General secondary care
Our close partnerships with the region’s leading NHS Trusts and independent healthcare providers gives you unrivalled access to a wide range of patients, clinical settings and specialist knowledge.
Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust is the largest hospital in the south west peninsula, providing comprehensive secondary and tertiary healthcare. Our geography gives us a secondary care catchment population of 450,000 with a wider peninsula population of almost 2,000,000 people who can access our specialist services. The population is characterised by its diversity – the rural and the urban, the wealthy and pockets of deprivation, and wide variance in health and life expectancy.
We provide services for patients at the following main sites as well as through clinics at other local hospitals and care centres: Derriford Hospital /Child Development Centre / The Plymouth Dialysis Unit /Radiology Academy
South Devon Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
The Horizon Centre, at Torbay Hospital is an exciting innovation, education and research facility based at Torbay Hospital, is one of just five flagship NHS Centres for Innovation and Training. The centre caters for a myriad of educational activities. From highly complex clinical procedures to the base-line skills required by the NHS workforce, the centre provides an environment where learning can thrive.
Placements
Students will have a number of hospital placements in Plymouth Hospitals NHS trust including Derriford and Mount Gould Hospitals in the third and fourth years of the programme with the fifth year spent in either Derriford or Torbay hospital. These placements cover all the medical and surgical specialities as well as emergency care. The placements emphasise the integrated and multidisciplinary nature of modern medical practice. There is a high clinical teacher to student ratio with a Consultant or GP led clinical feedback session at the end of each week in the third and fourth years. Students become embedded with the healthcare teams in the fifth and final year of the programme in 6 week blocks. This prepares students for work as Foundation Doctors when they graduate.