Student Selected Component (SSC)

SSCs offer students at Leicester Medical School the opportunity to take their learning to an area of personal interest. SSCs complement the core curriculum of the MBChB degree programme by allowing you to choose an area you personally want to study during these blocks.

The General Medical Council’s (GMC’s) publication Outcomes for Graduates (2018) recognises the need for medical students to develop professional values, behaviours, skills and knowledge. The breadth of options available in SSC blocks allows you to target the elements of this that you would wish to develop further.  The GMC also published Tomorrow’s Doctors in 2009 which recommended that an element of medical school curricula should be made available for student choice. Given this, SSCs are a core requirement of all undergraduate medical programmes.

At Leicester Medical School the SSC takes the form of two blocks. In Year 3 there is a four week block, which all students will complete. In Year 5 there is a six week block during which you will complete either an SSC or an elective. SSCs are delivered in many formats. Some SSCs are University-based and topics include medical ethics and law, and a number of languages. Some are clinically-based and offer a new clinical experience or the opportunity to build on a previous clinical experience that you have an interest in. Some SSCs have a project theme, such as a quality improvement project in a clinical setting. See the below for examples of SSC placements that have recently been offered.

A formative assessment forms part of the year 3 SSC. This is designed to help develop your academic writing skills. Feedback is collected for this assessment and for your and placement leads’ experience of the SSC as a whole. This allows the SSC team to reflect, review and keep the block as relevant as possible.

You have the opportunity to present your SSC placement at presentation days for both Year 3 and Year 5 SSCs.

Examples of SSC placements that have recently been offered