Year 4 - MBChB

Updated: 20/03/2023

Learning Outcomes

Year IV encompasses the main specialties – acute and critical care, continuing care and cancer, obstetrics, gynaecology and sexual health, paediatrics and psychiatry. The main learning outcome is ensuring that students acquire all the necessary skills within these specialties to allow them to practise as safe Foundation Year doctors.

These can be divided as follows:

Consultation: you will learn how to pitch your communication with both patients and families depending on their different backgrounds and situations, as well as with professionals, including in sensitive or difficult situations (e.g. breaking bad news, sexual health, mental health);

Clinical practice: You will acquire new knowledge, skills and attitudes to assess and manage patients appropriately and holistically whether they present in a specialty context or in an undifferentiated way (e.g. General Practice or the Emergency Department);

Decision making: You will become competent in clinical reasoning, generating differential diagnoses, making a diagnosis and devising appropriate management plans for common and important conditions encountered in the Year IV specialties. This will include more complex clinical problems and patients with multiple problems and from different specialties;

Ethico-legal practice: You will determine the ethical issues and legal frameworks surrounding individual patients. You will embed the practical application of ethical reasoning, guidelines and law in patient care, e.g. in the context of palliative medicine, termination of pregnancy, etc.;

Medicine Management: You will continue to develop your knowledge of medicines and medicine management. You will learn appropriate medicine choices in common clinical problems (e.g. antibiotics, analgesia) and have further prescribing experience;

Frameworks, safety and clinical governance: You will recognise key factors which affect patient safety in different clinical contexts and will routinely integrate patient safety issues into assessment, decision making and prescribing. You will learn about the main principles of clinical governance which guarantee evidence based medical practice and patient safety, e.g. audit, incident reporting, drills training, etc.;

Team working and leadership: You will further develop your ability to work in teams and reflect on how this contributes to patient care. You will increase your understanding of leadership, conflict management, and different organisational environments.