Medicine (with a foundation year)

We are looking to attract aspirational students, from all backgrounds, who display a caring attitude and values consistent with those of the NHS constitution. We aim to help you become skilled, professional and empathic doctors prepared to make patient care your first priority.

The first part of the Foundation Year is taught alongside Biological Science students before moving into Medicine-specific modules later in the year. You will meet patients and learn clinical skills during your foundation year. The course is designed to enable you to take forward the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that are required to practise medicine effectively and successfully in the modern healthcare environment. You will be prepared for the challenges that we are experiencing today and the inevitable changes in practice that will continue to occur in the future.

A pioneering and unique aspect of the Medicine with Foundation Year its bespoke empathy-focused curriculum. Our innovative course fosters your clinical empathy right from the very start of your training. You will learn through a person-centred approach to medicine with the understanding that empathy is a core value that will be central to your future practice. This is important because we know that treating people with empathy improves their experience of healthcare and is beneficial to practitioners too.

As a Foundation Year student, you will join our medical school community alongside other medical students. 2025 will mark our 50th anniversary, so we have plenty of experience of medical education at Leicester, which means that you will benefit from excellent training in an established, supportive environment. Throughout the course, you will learn from expert academics and medical practitioners working day-to-day in the NHS.

Once you complete the Foundation Year, you will join our five-year medical course. We run an integrated curriculum, meaning teaching and learning is based around patients and their needs. It is not a problem-based learning course, but rather a patient-focused curriculum which is delivered through a mixture of lectures, small group work, cadaveric dissection, and clinical teaching. This ensures that you learn the essential science underpinning how the human body operates, whilst learning how things can go wrong through the study of patients.

Your experience will be hands-on - you will work with real patients from the beginning. It's all designed to be clinically relevant - enabling you to acquire the medical knowledge, along with the professional competencies, that are essential to practise medicine effectively. In your first year following the Foundation Year, you gain the Health Care Certificate and hospital ward experience that allows you to work as a Healthcare Assistant. Simultaneously, through our Phase 1 Compassionate, Holistic, Diagnostic Detective course you start to develop consultation and examinations skills with actors and patients in our medical school and hospitals, preparing you for Phase 2 (years 3-5) where you will be based full-time in hospital, general practice and community placements.

Our world-class facilities provide a state-of-the art learning environment and allow you to experience what other medical students don’t. For example, we are one of the few courses to offer full-body human dissection. All first year students are provided with iPads. Study material is delivered directly onto these iPads. All the resources you need will be at your fingertips throughout the clinical phase of the course.

You will also have the chance to develop your clinical procedures in our state-of-the-art Clinical Skills Unit. During the clinical phase of the course, we offer a wide range of hospital and community placements in the region, including Leicester’s big city hospitals, and district centres across the Midlands, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire. This means you gain valuable experience in a diverse range of environments.