Physician Associate MSc

This course is in clearing

Overview

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MSc

Physician Associate MSc, home applicant, full time

  • Home Applicant
  • Full time, 2 years
  • Pound 11700 per year
We are no longer taking applications for January 2025.

What makes this course different

Funding available

NHS England, has provided a national funding strategy for all Physician Associates, where students receive a £5,306 grant towards tuition fees, split equally across the two years of the course (£2,653 per annum). You will not need to apply for this separately.

State-of-the-art facilities

Learn in our newly refurbished simulation centre featuring the latest in AR and VR technology.

See our facilities

Innovative clinical career

With a strong clinical emphasis from day one, the course is designed to produce safe and competent PAs, who put the patient at the centre of what they do, with an innovative module on learning clinical reasoning and extensive opportunity to learn good practice in clinical communication, that is closely linked to patient safety.

Course modules

NOTE: Modules are subject to change. For those studying part time courses the modules may vary.

Your future career

Physician Associates are a new type of healthcare professional that has a broad, generalist medical education. In order to work as a Physician Associate you will need to pass your university course and then in addition you will need to pass a professional national exam. This consists of a theory and a practical section. You will then need to join a Managed Voluntary Register of Practitioners. This will change under new GMC regulations due to enforce later this year. You are most likely to take this exam in May following completion of your course, however, the dates of national exams are subject to GMC.

You will work alongside GPs, physicians and surgeons to provide clinical care as part of an integrated multidisciplinary team either in a hospital or in the community. Physician Associates are dependent practitioners, who as they gain experience and skills can learn to work autonomously, but will always work under the supervision of a fully trained and experienced doctor. They bring a range of new professional talent to add to the existing skill mix within clinical teams. Physician Associates provide a stable, generalist section of the clinical workforce which will increasingly help to ease the clinical workforce pressures that the NHS increasingly faces.

Physician associates (PAs) will be regulated by General Medical Council (GMC) from December 2024. The new regulation will help assure patients, colleagues and employers that PAs have the knowledge and skills to work safely and that they can be held to account if serious concerns are raised. For further details, please refer to the GMC website.

Explore the different career options you can pursue with this degree and see the median salaries of the sector on our Career Coach portal.

How we support your career ambitions

We offer dedicated careers support, and further opportunities to thrive, such as volunteering and industry networking. Our courses are created in collaboration with employers and industry to ensure they accurately reflect the real-life practices of your future career and provide you with the essential skills needed. You can focus on building interpersonal skills through group work and benefit from our investment in the latest cutting-edge technologies and facilities.

Career Zone

Our dedicated and award-winning team provide you with careers and employability resources, including:

  • Online jobs board for internships, placements, graduate opportunities, flexible part-time work.
  • Mentoring programmes for insight with industry experts 
  • 1-2-1 career coaching services 
  • Careers workshops and employer events 
  • Learning pathways to gain new skills and industry insight

Mental Wealth programme

Our Professional Fitness and Mental Wealth programme issues you with a Careers Passport to track the skills you’ve mastered. Some of these are externally validated by corporations like Amazon and Microsoft.

Our Mental Wealth programme

We are careers first

Our teaching methods and geographical location put us right up top

  • Enterprise and entrepreneurship support 
  • We are ranked 6th for graduate start-ups 
  • Networking and visits to leading organisations 
  • Support in starting a new business, freelancing and self-employment 
  • London on our doorstep

How you'll learn

You'll be taught by a range of staff, who are either medical educators, scientists or work in clinical practice. This will ensure that you develop into safe, competent, reflective, multi-professional and patient-centred clinicians who can work safely under direct or indirect supervision. Each module is designed so that you can acquire the appropriate level of clinical knowledge and skills to support your clinical work.

Guided independent study

You will be taught by a combination of lectures and tutorials. Many of these sessions will be practical and will involve learning in a simulated clinical setting. When not attending timetabled lectures, you will be expected to continue learning independently through self-study. This will typically involve directed reading, practising clinical scenarios, reading journal articles and books, working on individual and group projects, undertaking coursework assignments and presentations, and preparing for exams. Your independent learning is supported by a range of excellent facilities including online resources, the library and the UEL VLE Moodle.

Academic support

Our academic support team provides help in a range of areas - including learning and disability support.

Dedicated personal tutor

When you arrive, we'll introduce you to your personal tutor. This is the member of staff who will provide academic guidance, be support throughout your time at UEL and who will show you how to make the best use of all the help and resources that we offer.

Workload

Each year you will spend around 300 hours of timetabled learning and teaching activities. These may be lectures, workshops, seminars and individual and group tutorials. Contact hours may vary depending on each module.

The approximate percentages for this course are: 

  • Year 1: scheduled teaching - 536 hours; guided independent study - 664 hours. 
  • Year 2: scheduled teaching - 1746 hours; guided independent study - 554 hours.

This is a 2-year full-time course, that is delivered over 3 terms across the year, and there is no summer break. The final results and awards are released in February. Graduates are then able to take their nationals (PANE/PARA) in May (the dates are subject to RCP/GMC timetable).

Your timetable

Your individualised timetable is normally available to students within 48 hours of enrolment. Whilst we make every effort to ensure timetables are as student-friendly as possible, scheduled teaching can take place on any day of the week between 9am and 6pm. Timetables for part-time students will depend on the modules selected.

This is a full-time course with an expectation to fully engage with scheduled teaching on campus and directed learning activities throughout the week for the full duration of the course. All students should be able to commit to 100 per cent engagement with clinical placements at destinations arranged by the university and should be flexible to commute to various placement locations to complete their mandatory clinical rotations.

Class sizes

To give you an indication of class sizes, this course normally attracts 30 students a year. Lecture sizes are normally 30 students. In the classroom for tutorials or in simulation you will be taught in smaller groups of 5 - 30 students. However, this can vary by module and type of learning activity.

How you'll be assessed

You will be assessed in various ways as appropriate for each module. 

This includes theory-based assessments, assignments based on clinical case studies, practical assessments, oral and poster presentations, completion of placement portfolio (placement assessment documents, and clinical skills passport), OSCEs (objective structured clinical examinations), and a 9000-word masters level dissertation. 

You will receive feedback throughout the course to support your learning and development and have opportunities to engage in various formative tasks to support your learning.

Campus and facilities

Water Lane, Stratford

Who teaches this course

This course is delivered by School of Health, Sport and Bioscience

The teaching team includes qualified academics, practitioners and industry experts as guest speakers. Full details of the academics will be provided in the student handbook and module guides.