Your journey
Our Graduate Entry Medicine (GEM) programme is a four-year accelerated course. In your first year, you will be taught in a dedicated teaching facility on our main St Stephen’s Green campus. In your second year, you will spend most of your time in our dedicated teaching space at Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown, Dublin. In your final two years, you will complete clinical rotations in a variety of hospitals and general practice settings in Dublin and throughout the country.
Case-based learning (CBL) is a core teaching and learning approach in Years 1 and 2. You will work in groups of approximately 12 students with a facilitator. You will also have the opportunity to choose from a wide range of tailored and credit-bearing student choice topics, allowing for experiences that support your personal growth.
Year 1 teaching involves a combination of lectures on the biomedical sciences and small group teaching involving weekly cases, facilitated case discussions, data interpretation tutorials, clinical skills training, group projects and anatomy practical labs. Surgical grand rounds, weekly cases and clinical skills training provide clinical context in the first semester. In the second semester, you will spend one half-day per week on clinical sites. Once you complete your exams, you will spend the last month of the academic year completing your clinical attachment at one of the teaching hospitals affiliated to RCSI.
In Year 2, the programme is delivered through systems-based modules, during this year you gain an understanding of the basic pathological and microbiological principles underlying human disease, along with detailed teaching on clinical aspects of relevant human conditions within each module. Each module comprises small group tutorials encompassing weekly cases, clinical skills (including relevant history taking and examination) and radiology.
Year 3 and Year 4 – which are delivered in RCSI affiliated teaching hospitals located throughout Ireland – provide you with different learning opportunities. In the third year, you will be immersed in specialties of general practice, paediatrics, psychiatry and obstetrics and gynaecology, along with medicine and surgery. Final year provides you with significant clinical exposure via attachments, electives and the sub-internship, through which you are trained and assessed as you undertake the roles of the near-graduating doctor.
Each GEM student is assigned a Personal Tutor who will support you throughout your time at RCSI. The Personal Tutor Programme is intended to provide you with a safe space for informed reflection on academic, personal and professional performance, assist you by ensuring you have the relevant supports (academic, well-being and more), provide resource and referral information to enable you to move towards improvement and encourage you to establish habits of continuous reflection, goal-setting and lifelong learning.