There are 15 medical schools in the UK which offer GEM: Birmingham, Cambridge, Cardiff, King’s College London, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Queen Mary (Barts), Sheffield, Southampton, St Andrews, St George’s, Swansea, Warwick, and a new medical school which has just opened at Ulster.
This gives you less choice than standard entry medicine, but it also means GEM is far more competitive – in 2020 Warwick had 1600 applications for only 193 places. Medical Schools Council has also reported that some GEM courses have up to 34 applicants per place. You may wish to check out each medical school individually for their competition ratios, if you want to apply where it is less competitive. This should not be your focus though, because each university has its own entry criteria and you should always consider other factors.
However, as with standard entry medicine, if you choose your medical schools carefully and play to your strengths, you can be in a very good position to at least make it to the interview stage. As a graduate, it is important to consider all of your options, including applying for standard 5-year entry medicine courses, although this does come with financial implications.
All GEM programmes generally follow the same structure, whereby the first two years of the usual 5-year course are essentially condensed into one year. Then from year 3 onwards, they join students of the standard entry course, where the clinical practice and lectures are the same. This means both cohorts of medical students will follow the same stream from this point onwards.
GEM programmes are really just designed to accelerate the time it takes for you to qualify – it is a lot of work though and expect a longer academic year in year one. The learning and teaching styles of each medical school that offers GEM will generally be the same too. An integrated course with a combination of lecture and tutorial-based teaching, with elements of PBL or CBL.
Unless you are applying for standard entry medicine in addition to GEM, you probably won’t consider applying to a medical school where there is the option to intercalate – as a graduate you will have a bachelor’s degree at the very least and possibly already a master’s degree (or even PhD for some!) and so no graduate entry programmes will have this option.
Therefore, there will be other factors to consider when applying to your four choices of medical school. If you simply want to gain a place on GEM, then you might not be too bothered about location – instead placing more emphasis on strengths of your application. For example – if you have scored more highly on the UCAT than the GAMSAT, then you may wish to apply to universities which use the UCAT for admissions, and vice versa too.
You can also apply to both Oxford and Cambridge for GEM – the only exception to this rule. Since most medical schools that offer GEM generally have the same requirements, these differ less than with standard entry. Instead, you may want to consider location, the course, university life and other factors slightly more when making your choices.
Posted by Nathan