Biomedical Science

If you are applying on the basis of A Levels, you must meet both the A Level and GCSE requirements below.

GCSEs

If you are applying on the basis of International Baccalaureate, you need to meet both our Higher Level and Standard Level requirements, as outlined below.

If you are applying on the basis of an Access Diploma, you must meet both the Access Diploma and GCSE requirements below.

GCSEs

We welcome applications from applicants around the world. For information on the requirements for your country, please visit our International Qualifications page.

If you are applying from outside of the UK, you will need to meet the English language requirements outlined here.This is a group 2 course.

We look for able students who have a strong interest in their chosen subject. Your success in Biomedical science will be underpinned by a good understanding of biology and a thorough knowledge of the principles of chemistry.

As a guide, your personal statement should include:

• What in particular interests you about biomedical science.
• The extra activities you may have undertaken to support this interest. Any participation in extra-curricular activities relating to science may be beneficial to your application.

• Personal and Academic Skills 1 and 2

• Fundamentals of Pathology 1

• Anatomy 1

• Fundamentals of the Living Cell 1

• Physiology 1

• Fundamentals of Pharmacology and Physiology

• Genomics

• Personal and Academic Skills 3 and 4

• Anatomy 2

• Physiology 2

• Molecular Basis of Disease

• Microbiology and Immunology

The aim of the placement year is to increase your employability by giving you professional experience and improving your skills in the environment of a relevant industry. You’ll build a portfolio of professional and clinical skills and competencies, to the standard expected by professional organisations. You will gain experience of working as part of a team, demonstrating professional behaviour, developing your transferrable skills and performing a range of biomedical techniques and research.

On placement, you are supervised by experienced scientists, clinicians and trained mentors. You receive the support as needed with at least two visits during placement, either by your personal tutor or another member of academic staff involved in running the placement. Potential placements include*:

• UK placements: HPA Colindale, Novartis, GSK, Pfizer, MSD, PHE Didcot (toxicology), Public Health, St George’s NHS Trust, Audit work, Clinical Research Facility, St George’s, Imaging Research Centre, St George’s.

• Academic placements: The Francis Crick Institute, UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health

• Erasmus placements: University of Barcelona and University of Granada in Spain; Radboud University and Leiden University in the Netherlands, and the University of Nicosia, Cyprus.

*This list is subject to change and should be used as a guide of where students may be able to go.

Assessment for the Professional Training Year is as follows:

• Personal and professional skills (30% of marks): CV preparation, Preparation programme, Completion of mandatory placement weeks, employer and tutor assessment of workplace assessment.

• Evaluation of placement (60%): Interim placement report (2,000 words), final placement report to be submitted at the end (6,000 words)

• Placement of learning (10%): Returning to St George’s and engaging with your student community, Summary report (500 words) of the experience and skills developed, Preparation of an updated CV to aim further career aspirations.

• Development and Disease

• Images of Anatomy

• Clinically Applied Musculoskeletal Anatomy

• Biology of Cancer

• Cell and Molecular Biology

• Genes and Gene Expression in Eukaryotic Cells

• Clinical Application of Genomics in Rare Diseases and Cancer

• Human Medical Genetics

• Personalised Medicine

• Conflict and Catastrophe Medicine

• Global Health Diseases

• Global Health and Comparative Health Systems

• Global Health Ethics and Law

• Culture and Mental Health

• Global Health Humanities

• Humanitarian Action and Ethics

• Medical Microbiology

• Immunity and Infection

• Neglected Tropical Diseases

• Future of Medicine Ethics and Neuroethics

• Research Ethics and Clinical Ethics

• Medical Ethics and Law

• Cardiovascular and Respiratory Diseases

• Science of Reproduction

• Pharmacology and Physiology of Drugs of Abuse

• Clinical Neuroscience

• Psychology and Psychiatry of the Mind

• Neuroscience of Sensation and Perception

• Structured Research Project

• Clinical Anatomy

• Clinical, Communication and Professional Skills in Healthcare

You’ll be taught by experienced staff with ‘bench to bedside’ research expertise – from the earliest phase of basic discovery to the development of new diagnostics, treatment protocols and approaches to healthcare delivery and preventive medicine.

Our award-winning faculty have scooped several prestigious prizes including the BPS Student Choice Award for Excellence in Pharmacology Teaching; the BPS Outstanding Young Investigator Award; Mentor of the Year at the  Women of the Future Awards; the Royal College of General Practitioners Research Paper of the Year Award; and an International Award for Publishing Excellence from The Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism (JCEM).

You’ll have access to seminars and events delivered by our four renowned Research Institutes and the chance to work alongside our researchers in your final-year project or through a four-week mini project. In the past, as an example, students have worked on animal models of congenital disease and investigated the efficacy of cancer drug treatments.

Our strong links with industry and the relevant professional bodies, including the Royal Society Life Sciences and British Pharmacological Society (BPS), facilitate opportunities to attend professional conferences, as well as apply for prizes and travel fellowships. Past guest speakers and visiting lecturers have included an ex-army conflict and catastrophe specialist, ethics experts from clinical trials and researchers from the Francis Crick Institute and Cancer Research UK (CRUK).

We use a range of assessment techniques, chosen to match the competencies being learned and tested within each module. Progress is judged by a mixture of in-course assessment and written exams; each year’s marks contribute towards your final degree classification. Methods include: short and long answer questions; single best answer questions; calculation and data analysis problems; essay questions; objective structured practical examinations where you demonstrate knowledge of structure and function in the dissecting room; and oral exams where you answer questions from a panel of examiners.

• Academic (teaching or research)

• Accounting

• Biomedical scientist

• Biotechnologist

• Clinical research associates

• Clinical trials

• Financial auditing

• Forensic scientist

• Healthcare scientist

• Law

• Medical writing

• Microbiologist

• Pharmaceutical industry

• Physician Associate

• Research Technician

• Science policy and civil service

• Scientific funding bodies

• Scientific services and reagents commercial sector

• Teaching

• Toxicologist

You must provide:

• full details of your Level 2 (GCSE or equivalent) qualifications with grades
• full details of your Level 3 (A Level or equivalent) qualifications with achieved/predicted grades
• a personal statement (more information about this document is available on the UCAS website). 
• an academic reference from your current or most recent institutions with predicted grades.

After submitting your application to UCAS:

• log in to UCAS Track and make sure all your academic details have been included
• if any subjects or predicted results are missing, email the Admissions Officer with your UCAS number and missing subjects and grades.

We will consider applications from applicants who wish to defer entry by a year, provided you plan to use the time constructively. If you are offered a place on the course and subsequently decide to defer, you must inform us by 1 June of the year of application.

Acknowledgement emails and letters are sent out as soon as we receive your application. Please make sure that your email account is able to accept communications from St George’s as we will mainly communicate with you via email.

Decisions from St George’s will be entered onto UCAS Track.

All face-to-face teaching will take place on the campus that we share with St George’s Hospital in Tooting, with appropriate social distancing measures in place.

We have not explored alternative locations for teaching, and have no immediate plans to do so.

If government advice on social distancing changes, we will consider ways in which we can deliver teaching onsite in a manner that is safe for students and staff.

We are not making any significant changes to the content of the Biomedical Science BSc programme.

Overall, the course in structure and content will be similar as advertised.

There is a possibility that government advice on social distancing may change in the future and this may restrict access to the campus. Even if this were to be the case, we expect to be able to continue to deliver the core modules of the programme and the final year specialisms and pathways as planned.

For students in all years, the programme has been re-designed to be a hybrid delivery of lectures delivered online as pre-recorded sessions or ‘live’ (synchronous) online lectures, and ‘live’ interactive weekly Q&A and discussion sessions.

Interactive small group tutorials, and the majority of laboratory and computer practicals will be delivered on site.

The existing learning outcomes for our modules and courses will remain in place.

From September to December 2021, all students will primarily access their learning, including learning materials, via the University’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), Canvas.

Hands-on practical teaching and learning activities will be delivered on campus, with appropriate social distancing and personal protective equipment (PPE) measures put in place and with controls on the number of people in each location.

The online components of the course will be designed to balance interactive real-time sessions with lecturers and other students alongside self-paced independent study.

Students will have clear learning pathways through the activities they are expected to engage with, and there will be opportunities to check learning and progress.

In the final year, we will continue to offer research projects that enable students to work with professional research groups tackling real medical and health problems.

We expect to be able to deliver laboratory-based projects with appropriate social distancing measures in 2021/22.

Our capacity to do so may change if government guidelines change. If that happens, we will do our best to provide alternative arrangements and to enable students to complete on schedule.

Non-lab research projects will also be offered, including those involving data analysis of previously collected data, surveys/questionnaires, bioinformatic analysis/data mining, or analysis of anonymised patient data.

To get the most from online study, hardware requirements will be established and communicated to all existing students and offer holders. Students will need their own personal computer or laptop and an internet connection in their place of accommodation. This needs to be in place at the start of the course. Once enrolled, students will have the ability to use Microsoft Office 365 as part of the University’s institutional licence, and will be able to access software required for their modules/courses via AppsAnywhere.

In addition, we offer Microsoft Office for Mac via Office 365, but only the following applications are available for Mac: Teams, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and OneNote. Web-based Microsoft Office applications are available on Mac. Full details are available here.

There is a provision for students who may struggle to meet the hardware requirements through the university’s IT Hardship team.

We are expecting to deliver the course within the planned timescales, and for successful students to graduate at the expected time.

We assess the knowledge, skills and attributes of our students in a variety of ways. These include formal written examinations, practical examinations and in-course assessments, which might include essays, practical write-ups and special study reports, oral presentations, poster presentations and research project vivas.

Formal written examinations, practical examinations, oral presentations and poster presentations would normally take place onsite.

However, we have developed online assessments so that these can go ahead regardless of whether students can attend site in the coming months.

Although some assessments are designed to be taken onsite, we developed an alternative strategy in 2020/21 to enable students to complete assessments remotely without coming to campus.

Through the process to agree changes to assessments, criteria were developed to ensure that they remained fair, valid and reliable and did not disadvantage any student.

This means that the assessment tasks will not change, but will be delivered online.

The impact will be limited because, although the way in which the assessment is being delivered is different, the assessment tasks, the learning outcomes that are being tested and the assessment criteria are the same.

The online assessments are also the same in terms of the challenges they present to students. The assessments are therefore consistent with the way they were intended to be delivered.

If assessments take place online, as in 2020/21, students will have (formative) practice exams, to get familiar with the process and make sure your WiFi, IT and environment are suitable for the exams.

In order to maintain an inclusive and equitable approach that recognises, for example, challenging domestic circumstances and poor home internet connections, we recognise that students will need to find an appropriate environment in which to take the assessment and make sure that they have IT equipment and a reliable internet connection. This may not be possible for all students.

Our aim is to lend equipment to students if their own facilities are inadequate.

We are also allowing students to apply to take their exam on campus using a networked computer or laptop with Wi-Fi connectivity.

Students can request assistance by contacting examonsite@sgul.ac.uk ideally 4 weeks before their exam if they think they will have difficulties meeting the requirements.

The majority of laboratory and computer practicals will be delivered onsite.

Although practical assessments in Years 1 and 2 are designed to be taken onsite, we have developed an alternative strategy allowing assessments to be completed remotely without coming to campus. This includes the majority of lab practical assessments and those previously undertaken onsite in computer rooms.

There is a possibility that government advice on social distancing may change. If that is the case, we will endeavour to re-design sessions, or delay practical components of the programme to a subsequent semester (or year), to protect the safety of our students.

In the final year, we will continue to offer research projects that enable students to work with professional research groups tackling real medical and health problems.

We expect to be able to deliver laboratory-based projects with appropriate social distancing measures in 2021/22. Our capacity to do so may change if government guidelines change. If that happens, we will do our best to provide alternative arrangements are to enable students to complete on schedule.

Non-lab research projects will also be offered, including those involving data analysis of previously collected data, surveys/questionnaires, bioinformatic analysis/data mining, or analysis of anonymised patient data.

We are continuing to offer the optional Professional Training Year between Years 2 and 3 of the programme.

However, some placements may not be available, depending on government advice at the time and the restrictions that the placement providers have to apply.

We do not expect students to incur any extra costs over and above those that we have advertised on the course page.

You will need a personal laptop or computer and access to the internet to participate in online lectures.

Information is available on recommended device specification.

If you are worried you might struggle to meet these requirements, you should email IThardship@sgul.ac.uk so we can look at support options for you.

Personal protective equipment (PPE), if needed, will be provided for you by the university.

For students in all years, the programme has been redesigned to be a hybrid delivery of lectures delivered online as pre-recorded sessions or ‘live’ (synchronous) online lectures, and ‘live’ interactive weekly Q&A and discussion sessions.

Meetings with personal tutors, interactive small group tutorials, the majority of laboratory and computer practicals, and some interactive weekly Q&A and discussion sessions will be delivered onsite.

Onsite delivery is expected to be 2 to 3 days per week.

You can find term dates on this page on our website.

At enrolment or re-enrolment you consented to the changes we anticipated as a result of the pandemic, which were outlined on the ‘Covid-19 updates’ tab of your course page.

Any changes that we are making are the consequence of current public health advice and our need to anticipate changes to that advice. Our capacity to offer alternatives is therefore limited. We do not feel that the changes will adversely affect students.  

If new you wish to avoid these changes by deferring your offer please contact admissions@sgul.ac.uk.

If continuing students wish to avoid these changes (e.g. by taking a year out from your studies) please discuss this directly with your course team in the first instance.

We remain, as always, focused on the best experience and outcomes for our students.  

If you have concerns about the quality of course delivery, please raise these with your course team in the first instance.

If you wish to take a more formal route, guidance is available to you in our student concerns and complaints procedure.