The best (and worst) UK unis for medicine have been revealed, but they’re super surprising

If you watched too much Grey’s Anatomy and now want to be a doctor, then I’m afraid you’re in for a rough ride. There are all-too-few medical colleges in the UK, and worming your way into one is super competitive. The Times and The Sunday Times features a ranking of 39 UK unis where you can study medicine, so you can see exactly which are the best (or the worst) places to apply.

The University of Oxford is apparently the best place to study medicine. Wow, Oxford tops a ranking. What a surprise. The University of Cambridge actually scored way lower than Oxford. Apparently the School of Clinical Medicine at the University of Cambridge does more research than the Oxford University Medical School, but the students are much less impressed with their teaching and experience. The other unis in the top ten are pretty surprising. A fair few less famous unis apparently have really good medical schools.

Well, the Cambridge medical school looks cool, even if it ranks badly
(Credit: Magnus Manske)

At the other end, the absolute worst uni in the UK for medicine is the University of Lancashire (according to The Times, anyway). The uni lets in students with far worse UCAS scores than other unis do. The Lancashire medicine course also got a much lower score for graduate prospects than courses at other places. Plenty of Russell Group unis that usually do pretty well in university league tables – including the University of Warwick, and the University of Nottingham – have pretty low-ranking medical schools.

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The Times comes up with all these rankings by factoring the entry standards, grad prospects, research quality, student experience and teaching quality of each course. It compiles all this data into an overall score of of 100.

The best UK unis for medicine in 2025:

1. University of Oxford – 100 score

2. University of Dundee – 99.7 score

3. Imperial College London – 98.9 score

4. University of Leicester – 98.1 score

5. University of Glasgow – 97.9 score

Glasgow’s Wolfson Medical School Building
(Credit: Thomas Nugent)

6. University of St Andrews – 97.5 score

7. University of Cambridge – 97.3 score

8. Queen’s University Belfast – 96.5 score

9. University of Bristol – 95.5 score

10. Hull-York Medical Score – 94.1 score

The worst UK unis for medicine in 2025:

1. University of Lancashire – 73.8 score

2. University of Buckingham – 74.4 score

3. University of Brighton – 80.8 score

4. Anglia Ruskin University – 81.9 score

ARU is in Cambridge, although the medical school is in Chelmsford
(Credit: PrinceMichailoff)

5. University of Warwick – 82.3 score

=6. University of Plymouth – 85.1 score

=6. University of Leeds – 85.1 score

8. University of Sussex – 86.8 score

9. University of Southampton – 87.2 score

10. University of Nottingham – 87.7 score

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Featured image of University College Hospital by C Ford.