Gateway to Medicine 2022 entry

- We're in the main clinical skills suite up on the top floor of the Medical School, and we have four rooms very similar to this. We use these rooms for clinical teaching for all three years of the course, and we do a mixture of teaching up here, usually practical skills, so learning skills like blood pressure, how to examine chest, how to examine the heart and abdomen, and things like that.

- The students are involved in some of the common investigations that they might be looking at in a patient who has diabetes, so they're testing urine for diabetic changes and testing blood glucose as well. This helps to give the students a flavour of how the investigations they might do in common practice integrate and relate to the patient that they've seen in the previous rules of the patient they have examined, the patient they've taken a history from. They then put all of those three things together to come up with an integrated feel of how patient management works in real life, and this really helps prepare them for practice when they will come across these types of situations.

- The anatomy facility on the top floor of the new Medical School, which was built in 2010, was a wonderful facility that we designed ourselves, and it provides the best sort of facility for anatomy teaching in the country.

We have a group of young doctors who spend a year with us who are the mainstay of our teaching and the dissecting room. They are taking time out after fully qualifying as doctors to teach medical students anatomy and clinical skills.

In the first year, the students study anatomy in a broad way to begin with but thereafter they will concentrate on the systems of the body, and so each of the systems is considered in turn and dissection takes place alongside clinical teaching here in the dissecting room.

- It's so much more useful in terms of really understanding and getting your head around the way the human body works. You can see a hundred pictures and never really understand how something fits together until you see it in a live body. I definitely think it's the best way to learn.

- We teach a systems-based curriculum which is integrated across all the medical science disciplines, and so the anatomy is based around the systems that are being taught in different
areas. So we dissect, for example, the cardiovascular system while we're also looking at the function and pharmacology which is associated with the cardiovascular system, and microbiology and so on. So everything to do with the cardiovascular system would be studied and researched. The anatomy is an integral part of that, because it's an important cornerstone of medical practice.

- It's really helpful to see the structures that you're learning about in a lecture where everything is colour-coded and then see it in the human body and really understand how everything fits together.

- In order to make sure we can graduate our students out with a BSc Honours in Medicine, we have to make sure they've got a solid understanding of the scientific bases that underpin medicine. And to help do that, we're not only delivering lectures that give the didactic content, the backbone to the understanding for the student that the scientific basis of medicine, but we also put that into practical context using the facilities here within the School.

This is a research-intensive School as well as being a teaching School. There's a variety of staff that involved in both delivering the content within the labs and also in the lecture theatre. They have research facilities on the second floor of this building. They often bring ideas down to how to augment our practicals and how to put a slant on some of the teaching to really contextualise it in the practical application.

- Communication skills is an integral part of the curriculum here at St Andrews. It's important for many reasons, but one of the main ones is it means better outcomes for patients at the end of the day.

- The communication skills practicals are - it might just be because of my group - but I find them a lot of fun.

- I really enjoy the communication skills training. There's demonstrators that help the whole way.

- It's a safe environment. We use simulated patients who are actors who play the role of patients, and that means that students can practice some of the communication techniques that we're discussing with them in an environment where they know that it's not going to have any consequences for a real patient.

- I'm one of a team of simulation patients who come down here to the Medical School. Increasingly, of course, as patients of medics, we very much hope that these students will be good communicators, that they will communicate well with their patients. And that's as important as their medical and technical skills.

- Our actors that we use as simulated patients are incredibly effective. Students are immersed in a room: they're on their own with the patient - a simulated patient - and they do have a feeling that this patient is experiencing the difficulties that they're talking about.

- When considering to come here, I was quite keen because it was such a small university and such a good ratio of teaching staff to students, and I think that definitely helps with my progression throughout the years here.

So living in St Andrews is an excellent place to live. In my first year, I lived in student halls which were very close to Medical School, and for the past two years I have lived in the centre of town.

- Aside from being a great place, I love the traditions: May Dip, the Sunday pier walk.

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[TEXT:] medical.admissions@st-andrews.ac.uk