Two medical students in discussion in university corridor)

Graduate Entry Medicine

MB, BCh, BAO (Hons)
School of Medicine

Your journey

RCSI's GEM programme is a four-year accelerated programme. In your first year as a GEM student, you will be taught in a dedicated teaching facility on the main St Stephen’s Green campus. In your second year, you will spend most of your time in RCSI's dedicated teaching space at Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown, Dublin. In your final two years, you will be on clinical rotations in a variety of hospitals and GP practices in Dublin and throughout the country.

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. You will learn to take and present a history from as early as the third week of the programme. At the end of the second semester, 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, you will be based full-time at Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown, which is one of the main RCSI-affiliated teaching hospitals in Dublin. In addition to lectures on pathology, microbiology and clinical sciences, you will also participate in small group tutorials (classroom or ward-based) on all aspects of patient care, including history taking, clinical examination, radiology, data interpretation and therapeutics. Two clinical attachments (each of one-month duration) take place at the end of each semester, providing you with the opportunity to become an active member of a clinical team within the hospital.

In Year 3 and Year 4 of the programme, the majority of teaching is hospital-based, where you will be attached to consultant-led (senior physicians) teams. In the third year of the programme, you will learn paediatrics, family medicine, psychiatry, and obstetrics and gynaecology, along with medicine and surgery. The final year of the programme concentrates on medicine and surgery.

Approved term dates for Undergraduate Medicine, Physiotherapy, Graduate Entry Medicine, MPharm and Advanced Therapeutic Technologies for the academic year 2023/24 can be found here.

Curriculum

Length and structure

Year 1 consists of two semesters delivered from September to June of the first year.

  • Semester 1 – from September to December
  • Semester 2 – from January to June

Each semester comprises 12 direct-contact teaching weeks and 2-3 weeks of revision and examinations.

The programme is delivered through systems-based modules, teaching you about how the body works in the healthy state.

Year 1 structure is as follows:

First semester

  • Fundamentals of Biomedicine
  • Musculoskeletal Biology
  • Blood: Haematology and Immunology
  • Health, Behaviour and Patient Safety
  • Gastrointestinal Biology
  • Medicine and Surgery 

Second semester

  • Cardiorespiratory System
  • Renal and Endocrine Biology
  • Nervous System Biology
  • Evidence-Based Health and Population Health Epidemiology
  • Medicine and Surgery
  • Molecular Medicine 

In addition to these modules, students attend Surgical Grand Rounds throughout the year. 

After the second semester final examinations you will have one month of hospital placement in June.  During this month you will be allocated either to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, Mullingar Hospital in Westmeath or Waterford University Hospital. Students will have two, fortnight-long attachments with different teams over this month and will have to opportunity to participate in all team activities.  

Timetable

Below is an example of a typical week for a Year 1 student.

Morning
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday

Weekly
Case

 Lecture Flipped
classroom/
tutorial		 Surgical
Grand
Rounds		 Lecture
Lecture Diagnostic
investigations		 Lecture Case
discussion		 Q&A
Lecture Facilitated case
discussions		 Lecture Lecture Small
group
clinical
skills
tutorials
Afternoon
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
Anatomy
practical lab

Anatomy
practical lab

 Lecture Lecture

Library time
self-directed
learning
Anatomy
practical lab		 Anatomy
practical lab		 Lecture Lecture

Length and structure

Year 2 consists of two semesters delivered from September to June of the second year.

  • Semester 1 – from September to December
  • Semester 2 – from January to June

Each semester comprises 12 direct-contact teaching weeks (each with three modules of four weeks duration), two weeks of revision and one week of examinations.

The programme is delivered through systems-based modules, where you will gain an understanding of the basic pathological and microbiological principles underlying human disease, in conjunction 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. Clinical teaching is also facilitated by simulation scenarios using our state-of-the-art simulators. In addition, elements of the programme are supplemented via online education and attendance at post-mortems, multidisciplinary team meetings, grand rounds.

The 12 weeks of clinical attachments during Year 2 will provide you with the opportunity to become an active member of a clinical team within the hospital and to learn about the multiple aspects of patient management within this setting.

The Year 2 structure is as follows:

First semester

  • Cardiology
  • Respiratory
  • Gastrointestinal and Hepatology
  • Clinical Competencies

Second semester (30 credits)

  • Renal, Endocrine, Genitourinary and Breast
  • Central Nervous System and Locomotor
  • Haematolymphoid and Tropical Medicine
  • Clinical Competencies

In Year 2 you will also participate in a 12-week hospital-based clinical placement in medicine, surgery, orthopaedics and opthamology. This occurs predominantly in Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown, which is one of the main RCSI-affiliated teaching hospitals in Dublin.

Timetable

Below is an example of a typical week for a Year 2 student.

Morning
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
Weekly case study        
Pathology Pathology Microbiology Microbiology Microbiology
Microbiology Tutorial   Tutorial  
Medicine/
surgery
case-based
teaching		 Medicine/
surgery
case-based
teaching

Clinicopathological
conference

 Tutorial Tutorial
Post-mortem Post-mortem   Medicine/
surgery
case-based
teaching		 Post-mortem
    Grand Rounds    
Afternoon
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
Lectures or
self-directed
learning		 Clinical
investigation/
case discussion		 GP tutorials Clinical skills Modular
case (II)
Lectures or
self-directed
learning		 Clinical investigation/
case discussions		 Clinical skills Clinical skills Self-directed
learning
Lectures or
self-directed
learning		 Clinical investigation/
case discussions		   Clinical skills Modular
case (II)

Length and structure

The final two years of the GEM programme are delivered in RCSI-affiliated teaching hospitals located throughout Ireland, providing you with different learning opportunities.

The structure for these years is as follows:

Year 3 rotations Year 4 rotations
Medicine and Surgery (ENT) Medicine and Surgery
Paediatrics and Neonatal
 Sub-internship
General Practice Student Selected Clinical Attachment
Psychiatry
Obstetrics and Gynaecology

Timetable

Below is an example of a seven-week rotation in Paediatrics and Neonatal Medicine for a Year 3 student.

  • Weeks 1-6: During this rotation you will spend one week focusing solely on neonates and five weeks assigned to Paediatric teaching units. Three of these five weeks of teaching will be conducted in Dublin sites and the remaining two weeks will be assigned to hospitals outside of Dublin.
  • Week 7: This week is dedicated to revision and exams.

You will be assigned to a day in an Emergency Department (ED) in which you will shadow the ED registrar or consultant. While in ED, you will work with your assigned classmate and practice taking patient histories under the supervision of a qualified doctor.

When you undertake the neonatology rotation week in either the Rotunda Hospital or the Coombe Women & Infants University Hospital, you will receive a brief introductory lecture on the care of the newborn, and small group teaching on neonatal examination and common problems in the neonate. You will spend time on postnatal wards, in outpatient clinics and in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) as part of a teaching ward round. You will work closely with SHOs and Registrars, with an emphasis on problem-based, consultant-delivered teaching. You will also learn to take a comprehensive perinatal history of an infant and perform new-born, discharge and six-week checks. You will also learn about the well and sick newborn.

The paediatric rotation is assessed using the following means:

  • End of rotation short case clinical paediatric exam
  • End of rotation short case clinical neonate exam
  • Continuous assessment, which consists of your paediatric logbook; a series of online quizzes; topic and case reports
  • Paediatric written exam in the summertime examinations

Learning experience

Meet Dr Gozie Offiah, Senior Lecturer and Director of Curriculum Implementation who explains our learning philosophy and how we integrate clinical and communication skills with knowledge acquisition and the formation of professional identity.

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Your learning community will allow you to connect with students from other years, both academically and socially, throughout your programme. Learn more about the six communities in the School of Medicine and how they will shape your RCSI experience.

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Find out about the wide range of teaching methods you will experience as an RCSI Medicine student. From our Anatomy Room, built more than 200 years ago, to our high-tech simulation labs – best practice and innovation are central to your learning.

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Formative assessment will help you to track your progress and decide how best to integrate feedback during your learning journey. Engagement with your personal tutor and your personalised e-portfolio will support your progress.

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Learn more about our wide range of student supports available to you. We have a large multidisciplinary team that can help you to overcome educational challenges and provide training and guidance as well as practical and emotional support.

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Discover how your exposure to clinical experiences at the earliest stages of your programme will shape your learning at RCSI. You will take increasing levels of clinical responsibility throughout your degree and experience domiciliary, community and hospital care settings.

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RCSI places a high value on supporting international clinical experiences for our students. Accordingly – through a network of international partnerships with other world-leading universities and healthcare institutions – we offer a significant number of clinical elective opportunities.

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Learn more about the RCSI Research Summer School, research electives and other intensive experiences that allow you to be exposed to core research skills in topics such as scientific writing, presentation, data management, statistics and ethics.

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