Introduction

Becoming a doctor at St George’s

St George’s has been training doctors since 1752, and we are delighted to welcome you to the stream of future doctors who come to study medicine with us. In some respects medical practice is very different from 250 years ago: we have many more scientific investigations, many high tech approaches to treatment that were not dreamed of in the eighteenth century. In other areas, things are very much as they always have been. Sick people still seek help from a doctor, hoping for cure or at least improvement in their health; people still want a doctor who will listen, who will not sit in judgement on them, whatever their illness, and who will do his or her best to help. Our courses reflect this: you will learn up to date science and clinical skills, but you will also find that there is emphasis on being holistically a good doctor, in learning to be a clinician whom a patient can talk to and trust, and who will practise medicine in accordance with the highest ethical standards. Our students are lively and questioning, and we enjoy the privilege of teaching, and learning from, our undergraduates. We hope that you will have a thoroughly happy time at medical school, and that when you complete your degree you will be proud to join the ranks of George’s graduates.

MBBS 5 year course

This course leads to the degrees of MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery) of the University of London. On graduation you will be able to register provisionally with the General Medical Council to practise medicine as a junior doctor. After that, you will do one year’s training as a Pre-Registration House Officer before full registration, and then further post-graduate study during your medical career.

You will be part of a first-year intake of 175 joining over 750 others who are at later stages of the course. Also there are nearly 100 other medical students on the four-year MBBS4 Graduate Stream, which is a separate course, although you will share some learning resources with them. For the first term of the first year you will join in learning with approximately 200 other new healthcare students following degrees in nursing, physiotherapy, radiography and biomedical science. The student population is from many different ethnic and social backgrounds, and includes a number of international students. The number of male and female students is roughly equal across all years.