Student Choice
Student Choice Placements are offered in Years 2 and 3. For more information on each of the available teaching opportunities please see below.
Why supervise a student choice placement?
- Useful to your practice, e.g. undertaking quality improvement, developing patient materials or helping to evaluate your service.
- Students are enthusiastic having chosen a project they want to do
- Engage with, inspire and be inspired by the next generation of clinicians
- Funding is available
Year 3 placements - now recruiting!
We are looking for passionate GPs who would like to organise projects for Year 3 medical students during a 6 week ‘student choice’ placement from 14th June to 23rd July 2027. We have already got projects in place in areas such as Migrant Health, Women’s Health and Deep End practice. As long as clearly linked to Primary Care we are very open to new ideas. You do not need to have experience of medical student teaching but need to be post-CCT.
Suggested topic areas:
Leadership in General Practice
Sports medicine
Generalism
AI and new technologies in General Practice
Diet and health
Acute and urgent care
Prison medicine
The ask:
During the 6 week project we would like you to be the overall supervisor for your topic and:
- Provide a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 8 seminars for the students relating to your topic – you can provide the venue or we can book this at the university for you. You can arrange for other people to deliver these sessions on your behalf. The students can also choose to attend other seminars from our existing catalogue of student choice projects that will be running at the same time (in fact this is highly encouraged).
- Provide at minimum of 4 and a maximum of 8 experiential sessions relating to your topic (you can be creative about what is meant by "experiential" e.g. pitch side at Ashton Gate, or joining you in your GP practice)
- Help with the organisation of some "out of Bristol" experience such as a relevant conference, a placement somewhere distant. For instance for the last two years students have been assigned to "Care for Calais" working with would-be illegal migrants to the UK. Note these experiences help a lot with recruiting students where options such as "Dive Medicine in Malta" are on the table! We do NOT expect supervisors to actually travel with students.
- Mark the student’s assignments (the student has to do a 3,000 word write up). Clear criteria are provided
- Provide contact with the students at least once a week during the placement (this would not be additional to any seminars you personally provide).
Payment
CAPC Teaching will pay £1,040 to you for organising the project plus £260/seminar for each seminar that you deliver. If someone else is delivering the seminar, we will pay them directly (payment rates are less for non-clinicians). Clinical sessions are reimbursed at £72/student/session.
In addition, you will be paid £260 for marking 4 projects (and a corresponding amount for more).
All payments are made after delivery of the teaching.
We can also reimburse student costs up to £1,000. For example, we paid all costs for students who volunteered with Care for Calais as above.
Administrative support is provided by the CAPC Teaching team and Dr Simon Thornton and Professor Trevor Thompson can offer their advice and experience.
How many students:
We would normally recommend 4-8 students
What happens next?
Please contact simon.thornton@bristol.ac.uk to discuss your ideas.
You will need to write a brief (1-2 side) proposal and have a think about how much it will cost
More detail and inspiration are provided in the following documents:
- Year 3 Student Choice Information for Supervisors 26-27 (PDF, 404kB) - this is medical school document providing more detailed information about SCPs
- Year 3 Student Choice Timeline for Supervisors 26-27 (PDF, 259kB) - this is from the primary care team and provides a summary of deadlines, including budget planning and risk assessment
- Student Choice Budget Planner 26-27 (Office document, 12kB) – shows reimbursement rates
- Example Deep End Student Choice Proposal (PDF, 56kB)
- Example Deep End Timetable (PDF, 72kB)
The deadline for submitting projects is 5pm on Friday 6th November 2026.
Once project proposals are submitted and accepted they are added to a catalogue. Students rank their projects and supervisors are informed in February whether any students have chosen their project. Unfortunately there is no guarantee that students will choose your proposal so we recommend that you leave any detailed placement planning until after you have confirmation that students have chosen your proposal.
Year 2 Placements
At a glance:
- Placements run in September/October
- Placements are 3 weeks long
- Each year around January we ask for placement proposals for Autumn of that year.
- There is funding available.
- Placement supervisors don't have to be in a salaried or partnership role, and can include other healthcare professionals within your team (locums, practice manager, pharmacist, ANP, physician assistant etc) and any other community or third sector contacts you may have
For more information about how to offer a placement and what it might involve, please take a look at our Year 2 Student Choice - Information for supervisors 2024 (PDF, 439kB)
The list below is not exhaustive but gives some ideas of previous projects offered. Please do get in touch with any ideas or questions.
Contacts
PHC teaching administration team