GENERAL PRACTICE AND ELECTIVE - 2025/6

Module Overview

You will be on clinical placements in general practice for the GP attachment.

You will be at one of the partner Trust hospitals for the elective period of four weeks, which is an opportunity for you to select a clinical medical specialty of your own choice. During your clinical placements, you will also spend one day in every three weeks in consolidation/ clinical skills learning back in the University. During this time, you will learn and practice the core clinical procedural skills and continue with case based learning.

Module provider

School of Health Sciences

Module Leader

DOULTON Jia (Health Sci.)

Number of Credits: 15

ECTS Credits: 7.5

Framework: FHEQ Level 7

Module cap (Maximum number of students): N/A

Module Availability

Semester 2

Prerequisites / Co-requisites

A student has to complete PASM011 before being able to sit the relevant section of the SBA at the end of the second Semester in Year 2.

Module content

Application of the above Learning Outcomes to the clinical disciplines of Paediatrics, Mental Health, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Emergency medicine , General Medicine and Surgery building on knowledge, skills and attitudes acquired from Year 1 of the programme.

Students will consolidate:

Professional Values

Public Health and Epidemiology

Ethical and legal issues

Basic sciences relating to the cases in the module.

Communication and development of interpersonal skills

The Clinical Method: taking focussed histories and performing clinical examinations

Pharmacology and Therapeutics

The core procedural skills

Assessment pattern

Alternative Assessment

N/A

Assessment Strategy

The assessment strategy is designed to provide students with the opportunity to

demonstrate progression in their learning in three domains of learning: Knowledge and Applied Knowledge of Clinical Medicine, Clinical Skills, in both core procedural skills, and consulting with patients and Professional Behaviour.

Because this is an integrated course, many of the learning outcomes listed above are tested by more than one type of assessment method. Knowledge and applied knowledge will be tested mainly by the SBA paper, Clinical skills by the Clinical Skills log, the portfolio and the end of year OSCE examination, and Professional Behaviour by the SBA paper, the portfolio and the OSCE examination

Thus, the summative assessment for this module consists of:

• 12 station summative OSCE at the end of semester 2


• Professional Behaviour and Clinical Practice (PBCP) portfolio


• 50 questions Single Best Answer (SBA) paper at the end of Semester 2

Module aims

• Provide students with the opportunity to build on their learning from virtual cases and clinical experience in Primary Care from Year 1, learning to apply knowledge and skills effectively through clinical reasoning, professional judgement, and in a patient-centred manner for the management of
  core medical conditions in primary and secondary care medicine.
• Give students the opportunity to extend their learning in a specific clinical placement of their own choice, the 'elective'.
• Broaden students' knowledge of patient presentations, building on those learned in Year 1.
• Give students the opportunity to learn core procedural skills, and continue practising core procedural skills learnt in Year 1, now with 'real' patients, and to show competence in these skills
• Develop students' professional and reflective approach to their patients and to their clinical responsibilities as Physician Associates working with Health and Social Care Teams in the NHS setting.
• Develop deeper understanding of people's rights in accordance with the Equality Act 2010, acting with respect towards all patients, colleagues and students, and to know how to take action to protect patients if needed.
• Provide an opportunity for students to consolidate their learning across Years 1 and 2 of the course prior to their end of module examinations.

Learning outcomes

Methods of Teaching / Learning

The learning and teaching strategy is designed to:

The building of knowledge and understanding will be achieved by an integrated learning strategy following a spiral curriculum design.

The learning and teaching methods include:

Learning on Clinical Placements - following an apprenticeship model, students will learn how different disciplines function within the NHS, the health and social care teams that supply them, and will follow patients through the system. They will clerk, assess and manage patients, under senior medical supervision, learning about common clinical presentations.

They will keep a patient log that will show their progress through these cases, that will be regularly reviewed by both their clinical Educational Supervisor on placement and by their academic tutor on campus, to ensure they are seeing a broad

range of core clinical conditions.

Indicated Lecture Hours (which may also include seminars, tutorials, workshops and other contact time) are approximate and may include in-class tests where one or more of these are an assessment on the module. In-class tests are scheduled/organised separately to taught content and will be published on to student personal timetables, where they apply to taken modules, as soon as they are finalised by central administration. This will usually be after the initial publication of the teaching timetable for the relevant semester.

Reading list

https://readinglists.surrey.ac.uk
Upon accessing the reading list, please search for the module using the module code: PASM011

Other information

The school/department of Health Sciences / Physician Associate PGDip is committed to developing graduates with strengths in Employability, Digital Capabilities, Global and Cultural Capabilities, Sustainability, and Resourcefulness and Resilience. This module is designed to allow students to develop knowledge, skills, and capabilities in the following areas:

Resourcefulness and Resilience:

During this second/final year of the programme students will have developed high levels of active and independent learning. They will receive further support in leadership, problem solving, navigating ethical considerations and working in professional and collaborative partnership with colleagues. This will also feature in the elective.

Employability:

The focus of students’ teaching and learning during this module will be preparation for clinical practice. On completion of this year students will be clinically capable, familiar with management of core clinical conditions and competent to manage common emergency clinical situations. Students will also be familiar with working in a range of NHS specialties and settings An elective period, selected and arranged by students, will facilitate further preparation for lifelong learning in their careers. By the end of this year students will be prepared to sit the National benchmark assessment for Physician Associates and, if successful, to apply for registration.

Global and Cultural Capabilities:

Students will be supported in reflection on their learning from placement experiences. This will include developing a person-centred and patient-centred approach

Programmes this module appears in

Please note that the information detailed within this record is accurate at the time of publishing and may be subject to change. This record contains information for the most up to date version of the programme / module for the 2025/6 academic year.