Placements
Extensive exposure to real patients in clinical settings underpins the development of your clinical skills. This experience will help you become an expert in the clinical environment.
During your placements, you’ll also learn from patients about the breadth and depth of diseases and health problems in a community and the effect of social and environmental factors on disease. This will help you to understand the multi-professional nature of medicine and the importance of the wider healthcare team.
Location: Exeter (St Luke's campus)
The main purpose of community placements is to give you experience, from day one of the course, of health and healthcare in the real world. You will normally meet your first patient within the first few weeks of your first year.
Year One placements are designed to give you a broad understanding of health and healthcare. Some of your placements will be with doctors while some will be with other organisations and individuals involved in healthcare.
You will have the opportunity to see and learn from doctors and other health and social care professionals, to meet and talk to patients and to learn about the factors that impact on their health.
You will share and explore these experiences in your PPG sessions and through doing this learn more about issues such as inequalities in health, the role of the family, how it is to be a patient and what makes a good doctor.
Locations: Exeter (St Luke's campus)
In Year Two, all your placements will be in General Practice and this will give you a very different set of experiences. By visiting the same practice on several occasions you will learn about continuity and about the management of chronic disease and disability.
You will continue to share your experiences in PPG sessions where you will learn about a range of relevant topics, such as risk, change, carers, health beliefs and coping strategies.
These placements will also help you develop your clinical and communication skills and prepare you for Year 3 of the course.
Locations: Exeter (Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Trust site) or Cornwall (Royal Corwall Trust site)
Location: Exeter, Turo, Barnstaple or Torbay
The first thing I ever did in Medical School, 9am on Monday morning, was attend a fertility clinical placement. It was a really great experience because it helps you understand what you are working towards at the end of the five years.
Praveena Dekonda
BMBS student
