Medicine

Medicine is one of the most demanding and rewarding professions a person can enter. It requires not only a comprehensive scientific understanding of the human body and the diseases that affect it, but the clinical skills, communication abilities, ethical reasoning and emotional resilience to care for patients across the full range of human experience, from birth to death and in the most challenging circumstances imaginable. Studying medicine at the University of Liverpool prepares you for this extraordinary responsibility through a five-year full-time programme that integrates scientific knowledge with early and sustained clinical experience.

The degree includes a year abroad, giving you the opportunity to study or work in a healthcare setting in a different country, broadening your clinical and cultural perspective. Across the five years of the programme you will study the biomedical sciences that underlie clinical practice, including anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, microbiology and pathology, alongside the clinical skills, consultation techniques and clinical reasoning that you need to function as a doctor. You will have early contact with patients and clinical environments, developing your clinical competencies progressively through placements in hospitals and primary care settings.

You will also study medical ethics, law, communication and the social determinants of health.

Graduation from a medical degree is the gateway to the Foundation Programme, the two-year period of supervised clinical training that all new doctors complete before specialising. From there, the range of career pathways is enormous: general practice, hospital medicine, surgery, anaesthesia, psychiatry, public health, academic medicine, research and a wide range of other specialties and sub-specialties. Medicine is a career that demands lifelong learning, and the degree is the beginning of a professional journey rather than its conclusion.