Health Screening
All accepted candidates will be required to complete health declaration and immunisation forms, and some will be contacted by an Occupational Health Physician where appropriate. If you accept our offer, you must submit the completed forms by the deadline stated in the offer.
Health Questionnaire and immunisation forms
While it is not mandatory, we would encourage all applicants to be vaccinated against Covid-19 for their own protection and that of colleagues and patients.The UK Government Health Authorities advise that all medical students are screened to identify possible carriers of the hepatitis B virus.
As soon as you have accepted your offer, you are advised to:
- undertake a screening blood test for Hepatitis B
- if negative, start a course of immunisation
- thereafter provide certified evidence of these
Failure to complete the required vaccinations may affect attendance on placement.
Further information
The College of Medicine and Health may reimburse students with financial hardship up to £200 of the cost of their vaccinations if they meet the eligibility criteria for a Chamberlain Award from the University of Birmingham. If this applies, you are advised to obtain receipts for any health checks that you have had to pay for and then once you commence the Nursing course at the University of Birmingham, you may then apply for reimbursement from the College, up to the cost of £200.
Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) Check and the Excluded Students Database (ESD)
Students will be required to complete a successful Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check before admission to the course.
You will receive an email from our central admissions team regarding DBS checks approximately 2-3 weeks after you have firmly accepted your place on the course. This email will contain further instructions, next steps and advise of the deadline for submitting your DBS application. Please be sure to check your junk/spam folders for this email before contacting us.
For further information, please see our dedicated webpage about the DBS and ESD Panel Process within the College of Medicine and Health.
If you have been excluded from school, please see our guidance for applicants on the ESD.
If you are an international applicant, you will instead be required to undertake a police check from your home country.
Fitness to Practise
As a student on the Nursing programme you will be expected to meet specified standards of behaviour relating to fitness to practise set by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and described in two documents:
The university publishes regulations and codes of practice that relate to Fitness to Practise status. In order to clarify what this means in terms of our expectations regarding behaviour of a medicine student on the Nursing course, we ask all students to sign a code of conduct. This document is reviewed on a regular basis.
Code of Conduct
Preparing for the course
There is no list of things you need to go out and buy. As you progress through the course you will decide for yourself what you need to purchase and what is not necessary.
The course does not recommend what books students should purchase. One student may feel that the library and online material provides sufficient support for a topic area, but another student may prefer to buy their own printed textbook (of their choosing from a recommended list of texts you will be given at the beginning of the programme). Therefore, there are many decisions leading to one student's purchases being very different from another. We do not recommend purchasing any equipment before you start the programme
If you would like to prepare with some reading in the summer before you start your course, we recommend that you recap what you have learnt in your recent studies that may apply to Nursing.