Welcome to Your eMBBS
You’re about to learn medicine like never before.
Congratulations! Following your outstanding performance at your Zoom interview, we, at Fictitious University, are thrilled to offer you a place on our eMBBS course (2030–2034). You will soon be emailed your username and password for iMed, our online learning platform. We have outlined the 4-year eMBBS course below so that you can familiarise yourself with its structure.
Year 1 and 2
The primary focus of the first two years of medical school is to give you a solid grounding in the scientific basis of medicine. You will have online lectures and group tutorials through iMed that will cover biochemistry and physiology in detail. These topics will be taught by Fictitious University affiliates from across the world.
You will be sent your virtual reality headset which will be used for your virtual anatomy sessions. During these sessions, our anatomy lead will walk you through the different parts of the body. You will also have access to the VR Anatomy App for personal study.
In Year 2, you will also complete a coding module with our computing department. This will equip you with functional skills in writing code and developing computing software. Your end of module assessment will focus on designing models that will aid medical education, patient care or public health.
To prepare you for patient contact, you will complete a clinical reasoning and communication module towards the end of Year 2 in order to prepare you to see patients the following year. You will receive a licence to use our GPT-3 powered AI patient, Sofia 2.0, with whom you will complete a number of simulations in which you develop your history-taking skills.
Year 3 and 4
During the second half of medical school, you will be split into two groups within the year. You will alternate between in-hospital clinical time and virtual teaching, in order to prevent hospital overcrowding in accordance with the post-COVID 2020 government guidelines.
Whilst you are in hospital, you will cycle through different specialties in medicine and surgery. A consultant will be allocated to supervise you throughout your placement.
Virtual teaching will continue to be delivered through iMed. You will begin to use Sofia 2.0, where you will decide on her investigation and management options and follow her through the clinical scenario. You will also have 4 scheduled sessions on acute care with our Sofia robot on site. A VR Surgery add-on pack will be sent to you at the beginning of Year 3. This is compatible with your VR headset and will enable you to attend surgical skills sessions and practice in your spare time.
Examinations
All VR and AI-based modules will have an end of module assessment that uses the technology that you should hopefully, by that point, be familiar with. Written examinations in Year 1 and 2 (Biochemistry, Physiology, Anatomy) and Year 3 and 4 (Medicine, Surgery, Clinical Specialties) will be open-book online exams. The exam questions are carefully designed to test the application and understanding of the knowledge you have accumulated. As a junior doctor, you will have to make time-pressured decisions, however, it is also important to use the resources available to you. The clinical vignettes used in the written exams and its open-book format aims to mimic these situations.
We look forward to meeting you in September and we hope that you are excited for the journey you are about to embark upon!
Kind Regards,
Professor G. Hippocrates
Dean of Fictitious University School of Medicine
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To any current, prospective or former medical students who may be reading, take note of your current emotions. Some of you may feel a degree of tension and, perhaps, sadness that the classical medical education that you received, featuring live dissections and arduous consultant ward-rounds, is becoming a thing of the past. Others may feel excited about these changes and may wish that their medical education was facilitated by such technology.
Change has been a feature of medicine since its conception, whenever that may have been. At medical school in ancient Greece, you may have been taught to balance the four humours in order to treat a patient. In the early 19th century, the medical student may have been asked to help pin down the gangrenous right foot of a patient, writhing in agony, as the surgeon swiftly sliced through flesh and bone with a rusty saw. Today, your pixelated senior lecturer may ask you to submit your answers through Mentimeter as his webcam gives you a detailed impression of his nasal cavity.
The underlying ethos of medicine, however, remains unchanged. The medical students in the aforementioned situations all had the same goal — to accumulate knowledge that will best prepare them to treat patients. It is no wonder, then, that many present day medical schools will stand their bright-eyed first year students in a hall and collectively recite the Hippocratic oath as they commence their journey in medicine.
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability.
Hippocratic Oath
