The UK’s first ever private medical school will soon open its doors in a historic former paint factory.
Registration begins on Monday and lectures start on January 12 at the University of Buckingham Medical School, in the institution’s Chandos Road Building.
The first intake of 70 medical students will begin their studies in the former creamery and Cementone factory, which has been redeveloped to create purpose-designed lecture and seminar facilities.
In the future, the plan is to renovate the former Innov8 site on Tingewick Road, which the university owns, to house the medical school.
The first phase of the four-and-a-half-year MB ChB course will offer a mix of clinical and biomedical science teaching over two years.
The university is working in conjunction with more than a dozen GP surgeries, from Aylesbury to Northampton, led by Dr Greg Simons of Buckingham’s Swan Practice.
Students will come face to face with real patients from the fourth week of their course.
The course also features ‘narrative medicine’, where students meet a patient with a long-term illness amd spend 18 months following them.
The second, clinical, phase of the degree will be centred at Milton Keynes Hospital NHS Foundation Trust over the remaining two and a half years.
The uni is also collaborating with the UK’s leading mental health charity providing specialist NHS care – St Andrew’s, Northampton.
