At Edge Hill’s Medical School we will support you to achieve your ambitions. Do you dream of becoming a doctor, but feel like your qualifications are holding you back? Our foundation year degree means that you may be able to explore opportunities that you didn’t think were possible. A degree in medicine can be a gateway to global opportunities, including working in the army, the navy, or with asylum seekers. We spoke with three of our academic staff about their journey into medicine.
Can you tell me about your career?
Dr Rebecca Farrington, Associate Head of Undergraduate Medicine
My career has taken me all over the world, from the Thai Burmese border in a refugee camp, Liberia in West Africa, South Sudan, and I even worked for the army for a bit in Germany as a civilian GP.
I then went to London and spent half my time working in practices in deprived areas. After this I went to Wales and worked for five years as a GP and then moved to Manchester working within a GP surgery for people seeking asylum. That was one of my real interests, having worked in the refugee camps in various places and being really interested in health inequality. I still work across the whole of Salford, my patients are all either seeking asylum still or are brand new refugees who haven’t got their refugee status. I also work as a mainstream GP. And then the rest of my week is spent in education, so I have three jobs which all align with each other.
Dr Simon J Mercer, Senior Clinical Lecturer
I spent 20 years working in the Royal Navy, including three years of general duties, which consisted of going away on submarines and ships.
I was the doctor on the ship, which involved submarine medicine and diving medicine. And then when the Navy deploy, they need a surgical team. The Navy ran the hospital at Camp Bastion in 2011, so I was deployed there for two months as part of the trauma team, and I was also deployed to Iraq during the Gulf War. Camp Bastion was the best trauma hospital in the whole world, and we’re able to take all the lessons that we learned from there back to the NHS. I then decided I wanted to do anaesthetics, and the Navy wanted their anaesthetists to work in major trauma centres. I started working at Aintree University Hospital, which is one of the major trauma centres in the region, and I became a consultant in 2011.
Dr Minal Singh, Director of the Medical School
I feel very privileged to do what I do. I genuinely like all of it because it’s very varied and it can be quite creative.
I’m a consultant dermatologist in Salford Royal Foundation Trust in Manchester, and the Director of the Medical School at Edge Hill, where I’m a Professor of Medical Education. I still need to be in clinical practice because it’s my responsibility to guide those who are teaching medicine. I facilitate and have responsibility of the governance of medical education. I also have a national role, where I’m the Education Vice President for the British Association of Dermatologists. I develop educational materials to all those who see patients with skin problems who aren’t training to be a dermatologist. So that could be oversight of medical students, doctors who aren’t dermatologists, pharmacists, for example. As Director of the Medical School, I oversee all the programmes in the medical school at Edge Hill. If you’d told me as a medical student or junior doctor that this is what I’d end up doing, I would have laughed at you.
So would you say a medical degree opens doors to a whole variety of different career opportunities?
You can do lots of things with a medical degree. The coroner is a doctor. Pathologists work in labs. There’s lots of careers you can do that aren’t in primary care in a GP surgery or in a hospital. It’s important we make sure that everyone is aware that there’s loads of different opportunities. And there’s probably going to be some things that are not invented yet. We don’t know what artificial intelligence is really going to do. There’s things like space medicine. There’ll be loads of different jobs, but a medical degree gives you a good grounding to go into any of these things.
Why do you think it’s important for staff teaching medical degrees to continue to work in practice?
You can bring stories of your patients and your experience to your teaching and to the way that you manage. It’s about credibility and being as authentic as possible. How can I know how to teach and support those who teach medical students if I don’t actually know what the job is like? I love being with patients and I wouldn’t stop it for the world.
What’s unique about Edge Hill’s degree?
We have an educational supervisor who is your supervisor for all three years through your clinical years. One medical student can meet up to 500 different teachers in their clinical years. Every nurse, healthcare assistant, doctor, physiotherapist, radiographer that you meet teaches you something. At Edge Hill we make sure you have an educational supervisor that is your constant for all three years.
The ethos of Edge Hill is unique compared to other medical schools. There is a big focus on community and mental health, not just the other specialities such as surgery or oncology.
We attract people who perhaps wouldn’t have naturally gone into medicine because of our foundation year option for students from the North West of England. This is key for people who have maybe not done science A levels, or maybe they’ve completed alternative qualifications first. We also focus on widening access, so our students are from a broad range of backgrounds. Maybe their parents haven’t gone to university, or the students might still be working as a carer while completing their medical degree. You might think you can’t become a doctor, but we’ll support you to graduate and achieve your aspirations.
We have an absolute breadth of experience. We have nurses, pharmacists, sociologists, psychologists, physiologists, anatomists. These people all teach you different elements and are experts in their own right.
Our cohort size means that we can be more personal with our students compared to other universities. The staff and the students have a very direct relationship and that’s quite unique. We’ve got a beautiful campus, with a bespoke simulation and clinical skills building right next to the medical school.
March 26, 2025
