Students only go to BNSSG and central Bath practices in Year 1. They have seven or eight sessions in practice on a Thursday as a group of six. They have four placements in their Foundations of Medicine block to introduce them to the healthcare environment and talking with patients. The second part of the year sees the start of the Case Based Learning (CBL) cycle where the students spend two weeks discussing a particular case. The students will come out to practice on three or four of their CBL cycles where they will meet patients and practice basic clinical skills linked to the particular case they are studying. For each case based fortnight students will alternate their visits to primary care with secondary care visits. 

Students only go to BNSSG and central Bath practices in Year 2. There are a total of five or six sessions in practice on a Thursday as a group of six students. In the Autumn students cover: Skin, Body Defence, Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and Anaemia, Blood and Clotting. After Christmas, the cases cover specific symptoms; chest pain, breathlessness, abdominal symptoms, joint pain, urinary thirst and weight loss, headache and collapse.

In Year 3, students come out to the practice for a whole day every fortnight as a group of six. The year is split into two blocks, each of eight days in general practice. The first seven days of each block are practice based and the last block is based at the academy. For part of the day the GP facilitates a workshop with the students and for the other part of the day, some students will be consulting with the GP observing whilst other students undertake a mixture of observing other health professionals within the practice and self directed learning. 

In Year 4, students come out to practice every Wednesday during their 18-week CMoP clerkship, usually in groups of four. The emphasis is on becoming embedded in your team, experiential learning, carrying out authentic tasks and longer term follow up of patients. The aim is to help them learn to manage the uncertainty and complexity inherent in medical work.

In Year 5, students do a nine week apprenticeship in practice as a pair of students. Our expectation is that students will spend most of their time consulting independently as a pair. Each week they also have one joint surgery with their supervisor, time with allied health professionals and time to spend on a project in the practice. 

There are opportunities for students to do Student Choice projects in Primary Care and audit projects in general practices are popular. You would be supervising a student doing a project of your or their choice, including marking the completed project. For more information, see our Student Choice pages.