MBBS in University of Liverpool School of Medicine

The University of Liverpool's School of Medicine is known to proudly state that it was established earlier than the university which now hosts it. Indeed, in 1834, the physicians and surgeons of the Liverpool Royal Infirmary established the School of Medicine and Surgery of the Liverpool Royal Institution, located on Colquitt Street, nearly 70 years prior to the University of Liverpool being granted its royal charter in 1903. During the course of the nineteenth century, it maintained its autonomy even during the Anatomy Act reforms of the 1830s and the establishment of the Victoria University in 1884, and it is one of the first medical schools to join an independent University of Liverpool, rather than the other way round.

What follows from this history is not just age, but the habit of doing things first. Thus, in 1898, a group of staff affiliated with the school established the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, which became the first medical school worldwide dedicated to the subject of tropical medicine. Among its early researchers were Ronald Ross who won the Nobel Prize based on the research performed at the institution on the transmission of malaria. The alumni of Liverpool School of Medicine include three Nobel Laureates in total, information which the school's agents prefer not to discuss due to the fact that it conflicts with its new status as an affordable, high-volume medical school. The original teaching location, the Waterhouse building, was completed in 1889 as Liverpool Infirmary and currently houses the Clinical Skills and Simulation learning area of the School. Another building, Cedar House, erected in 1933 as a nurses' accommodation building adjacent to the Waterhouse building, is currently the home of the Medical School activities on campus.

This volume is real: the University of Liverpool is running one of the largest medical schools in the UK. Every year, the school admits around 340 students to the five-year MBChB programme (UCAS code A100), as well as to a separate four-year graduate entry pathway. In total, the medical school has roughly 1,400 medical undergraduates and 600 taught postgraduate students enrolled at any moment of time. This size affects all aspects of how the programme operates. Since 2014, the programme is delivered using an integrated spiral curriculum, which replaces the previous problem-based learning approach. Specifically, in each of the two first years of study, each System Block integrates physiology, biochemistry, pathology, microbiology, immunology, pharmacology and anatomy around a particular body system, rather than teaching each subject separately. Starting with Year 3, each four-week rotation in a hospital is preceded by a week of case-based teaching during an Academic Week, tailored to the material that the student will need during the upcoming rotation. As far as the assessment methods go, apart from written examinations, students have to complete Clinical and Professional Skills Assessments in the OSCE format, and they are tracking their performance via an electronic portfolio rather than using a single end-of-year examination.

Students rotate among different clinical settings within NHS Trusts and specialised hospitals of Merseyside and North West regions. These placements include Alder Hey Children's Hospital, which is one of the largest children hospitals in Europe, and the nationally recognised palliative care placement. The University has a gold Teaching Excellence Framework award, and by Year 4, students take specialist rotations in mental health, neurology, obstetrics and gynaecology, followed by a four-week elective placement, usually abroad.

The natural question is what makes one to choose Liverpool over its North West competitors, Manchester and Leeds, which are larger and older, given the fact that the Liverpool's international tuition fee of £50,000 a year for 2026/27 is very close to the top of the medicine programme fees in the UK, being beaten only by Cambridge. The first reason is the sheer size of the programme: with around 1,400 undergraduate medical students on campus at any moment of time and 23 international places available on the standard A100 route, the clinical placement network offered by the medical school is correspondingly large and includes specialisations in excellent centres of excellence which a smaller cohort would not get access to proportionally. The second reason is that Liverpool is one of the relatively affordable British cities to live in as a student, which does not affect the tuition bill, but reduces the total price of studying.

This is not cheap pricing: the total cost of a five-year Liverpool MBChB for an international student still amounts to hundreds of thousands of pounds after adding accommodation, food, and the Immigration Health Surcharge to the tuition bill. However, when comparing Liverpool to other options with similar fee, the cost-benefit trade-off made by such a family would be a large and historically rich medical school with an extensive placement network, set in the city where the non-tuition part of the budget stretches further than in other British university cities.