Balancing work while studying an Access to Medicine Course
Last updated 17/01/2026 at 19:11
Wondering if you can work alongside an Access to Medicine course as mature student? You’ve come to the right place! In this post I’ll be providing financial organisation tips, funding sources and sharing insights on how other students balanced their workload.
As a mature student, it is likely you are in some form of employment that you can’t casually abandon and financial commitments that haemorrhage your bank account each month. At university, Student Finance provides some semblance of support through a maintenance loan to assist with daily living. However, access courses operate differently, entitling you to minimal or in most cases, zero funding at all.
🔎 Be realistic and do your research
Perhaps the most important step before attaching yourself to the idea of medicine. You must first consider balancing the access course with employment, finances, commitments, life. Every year, a predictable subset of students withdraw, only to discover too late they had not thought it through (four students dropped out of my cohort alone).
You must account for everything: course content, reputation, location, logistics, financials, time, commitments, student experiences. If your schedule is already tight, the course (and most certainly medicine) will not fit around it.
From experience, the students who succeed are not always the most inspired. They are the ones who have anticipated the intensity, constraints and entered with a game plan. The ones who struggle tend to be blindsided as they underestimated the course.
🗣️ Communicate with your employers
Being transparent preserve good working relationships, creating more room for flexibility when the course inevitably occupies your entire life.
As of 2024, you are legally entitled to submit a flexible-working request from day one of employment, your employer has to read and respond to this in a reasonable manner.
Flexible working can take many forms, including:
- – part-time hours
- – staggered hours
- – remote working
- – working from home
- – hybrid working
- – flexi-time
- – job sharing
- – compressed hours
- – annualised hours
Some requests are palatable to employers while others can be met with contention. If your flexible working request is denied, seek support from Citizens Advice. If your request is approved, ensure changes are formally documented and legally recognised to avoid selective amnesia from your employer. Perhaps it is wise to contact the college to request important term dates and relay these to your manager prior to commencing the course.
A note from the author: I am on an annualised hours contract. During term times I work two days per week and then make up the remaining hours for the year across holidays. I receive a consistent full-time salary each month. Without this flexible working arrangement, I doubt I would have stuck out the access course or medicine at all but it has been manageable.
🗓️ Be savvy with annual leave
Annual leave & study leave
During your first week, you will receive your college timetable. I would strongly advise painstakingly combing through exact term and exam dates so you can plan the entire year in advance.
How one chooses to deploy their annual leave will entirely depend on the job, hours, commitments and how attached you are to idea of rest. In the UK, full-time workers are legally entitled to 5.6 weeks paid annual leave per year which sounds generous until you realise how rapidly it evaporates once exams enter the picture. Find out part-time annual leave entitlement. Side note: public service jobs accrue additional time off in lieu of public holidays.
In addition to annual leave, you are legally entitled to request study leave once per year for training, conferences or external courses. Employers may choose to pay for it if it benefits them. More commonly, it is unpaid but may give you additional hours to study if needed. Working in the healthcare sector may give you some sort of advantage.
Helpful links relating to annual leave:
💸 Get your financials in order
Organisation
The reader probably eye-rolled, obviously I have to be organised. At risk of patronisation, you will have a significant drop in income followed by a period of successive sacrifices. Your bank account will continue to be haemorrhaged and unavoidably you should know your finances in forensic detail. Personally, I outsourced this by buying a simple Google Sheets financial spreadsheet off Etsy for under £10 as a starting point.
Utilise unsociable working hours & financial packages
One of the few ways to offset financial erosion. Evenings, nights, weekends and holidays are disproportionately lucrative for the obvious reason that they are unpopular. The trade-off is you will miss social events or holidays but in return you are gifted with the ability to stay afloat your finances during the access course.
If you are planning on relocating to a different area for the access course, some employers helpfully offer relocation packages to cover expenses of rent, moving costs, travel with some offering an additional sign-on bonus.
Colleges (e.g College of West Anglia) provide financial packages to help cover the costs of relocation accommodation, travel and study materials which we all found incredibly helpful.
Student status
One might assume that student discounts are reserved exclusively for university students.
If you are enrolled on a college course, you can apply for a National Rail 16-25 railcard even if you are over 25 years old. You are also eligible for UNiDAYS unlocking discounts on food, clothing, technology, travel. All that is required of you is to confirm college email address.
You may be exempt from council tax if you live with other students or alone, provided the course is a minimum of 21 hours per week (including self-directed study across a year). You will receive a letter from the college confirming your student status.
If you only need to resit one GCSE… most colleges allow you to do this for free alongside your access course, sparing you over £300 in private fees.
Bursaries, grants and essay competitions
Bursaries, grants and essay competitions are not exclusive of undergraduates. Many of these opportunities exist to award demographic imbalance and financial hardship (e.g care leavers, minority groups, primary caregivers). Be sure to consistently check throughout the year as they do vanish quickly.
Below are a few opportunities that exist to get you started:
If you’re struggling with finances...
No matter how financially literate you are, life will intervene at the most inopportune moment. Almost everyone will struggle financially at one point but you do not have to absorb it alone.
Below are various external resources that could support you:
- Turn2Us |List of grants, bursaries and resources
- Universal Credit|An option if you’re in full-time education or working part-time
- Surviving Economic Abuse|Financial help particularly for financial abuse survivors
- Cosaraf|Hardship Fund for those experiencing financial difficulty of all faiths
- Greggs Foundation|Hardship Funds towards white goods, utilities and food
- RCN Foundation|Financial assistance for registered nurses and healthcare assistants
- Citizens Advice|Provides legal, housing and debt advice + cost of living grants
- Money Saving Expert |Provides advice on the cheapest deals + funding opportunities
- DebtCamel|Debt Advisor with 20+ years experience + offers FREE advice
Other resources
- Insight into College of West Anglia’s Access to Medicine Course
- Term dates at College of West Anglia
- Flexible working requests information Gov.UK
- Struggling with finances? | Turn2Us Grant Search
- Finance to Medicine | Follow Awais’s Journey on TikTok
- How to Maximise Annual Leave in 2025 for UK and Ireland
- Flexible working request | Annualised Hours Contract – What is it?
