Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences
About Us
The School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences is a school within the Faculty of Science. It is located in St Michael?s Building in the centre of Portsmouth. The south wing of the building was opened by the Nobel Laureate James Watson in 1997. The building has recently undergone a million pound refurbishment to ensure the continue provision of 'state-of-the-art' teaching and research facilities in health sciences such as pharmacy and biomedical science. Our teaching and research are highly rated by external review bodies with teaching scoring a full mark of 24 in the QAA Subject Review and research rated a grade 5 in the RAE assessment.
Further information on our research activities.
How we Teach
The School offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate full-time and part-time degree programmes. All undergraduate programmes are delivered through a combination of lectures, seminars, workshops and laboratory practical classes. The lectures will provide students an overview of the topic under study. Students are expected to carry out further directed self-study by reading around the subject.
There are laboratory classes throughout the course to enable students to acquire the appropriate technical skills as well as to illustrate the theories highlighted in lectures. In the final year, students undertake a research project that may be laboratory, practice or literature based.
Placement Opportunities
For the Pharmacy course, students will have opportunities to learn with students studying other health related courses such as medicine and nursing both here at Portsmouth and also at the University of Southampton. In both first and second years, students will spend two weeks each doing this. In the third year, they will be spending time in hospital and community pharmacies to gain some knowledge of the roles of being a pharmacist. For the co-terminus BSc (Hons) Biomedical Science programme, students may gain clinical competence by working in hospital laboratories. In some courses, such as BSc (Hons) Pharmacology and BSc (Hons) Pharmaceutical Sciences, students have the opportunity to spend a placement in a suitable workplace in the UK which can count towards their final year project.
Support for Students
The staff members teaching our courses are enthusiastic, dedicated and knowledgeable. They encourage and assist students to achieve their full potential. In order to help all students settle in to university education, upon entry each student is allocated a personal tutor who will provide pastoral support throughout his/her course of study. Further student support is provided by a number of central student support units providing assistance in study skills and other aspects of university student life. The quality of student support provided by the University is praised in the government institutional audit.
Career Prospects
Our graduates have good employment records. Virtually all our pharmacy graduates will enter the profession as community or hospital pharmacists. A few will choose to work in the pharmaceutical industry. With our close links with local employers we have a near 100 per cent employment record for those biomedical science graduates wanting to enter the pathology service. We also have a good employment rate for all our graduates wishing to enter research. A significant number of our pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences graduates will work in various areas of the pharmaceutical industries including research and development, regulatory affairs, clinical trials and drug marketing.