BSc Medical Sciences and Population Health with a Placement Year
About this course
Medical sciences and population health together bridge the gap between understanding the human body and understanding why communities experience very different health outcomes. Medical sciences provides the biological and physiological foundations, covering how the body works at the molecular, cellular and organ level and how disease arises when those systems fail. Population health extends the frame outward, asking why health and illness are distributed unequally across populations and what range of factors, from genetics and behaviour to socioeconomic conditions, environment and healthcare systems, determine the health of individuals, groups and whole communities. This four-year full-time programme at Swansea University, which includes a placement year, brings those two perspectives together. You will develop an understanding of the biomedical sciences that underpin clinical medicine alongside a grounding in the epidemiology, social science and policy frameworks that population health demands. The placement year gives you direct professional experience in a relevant healthcare or public health setting, allowing you to see how the knowledge you are developing applies in practice and building the professional competence and contacts that will serve you in your career. The programme is designed for students who want to be at the forefront of healthcare advancement, engaging with the data-intensive, multidisciplinary approaches that modern population health science increasingly employs. Graduates of this programme are well positioned for careers in a healthcare landscape that increasingly values professionals who can think at both individual and population levels. Public health, health policy, epidemiology, clinical research, healthcare management and health data analysis are all well-established career directions. The NHS, government health agencies, research institutes, pharmaceutical companies and international health organisations all employ graduates with this combination of biomedical and population health expertise. Postgraduate study in public health, epidemiology, health data science or clinical research is a natural further step for those who wish to develop specialist expertise.
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