A London medical school has signed a merger agreement with one of the capital’s leading universities, bidding to create a “world-class institution”.
City St George’s, which combines City, University of London and St. George’s medical school, will begin operating from August 1, 2024, subject to necessary regulatory approvals.
City’s current president, Anthony Finkelstein, will remain president of the combined university which will become one of London’s largest education destinations and suppliers of the capital’s health workforce.
“There will be a bigger student community, access to greater resources and interdisciplinary opportunities, increased support and over time, more streamlined processes,” Finkelstein announced to students last week.
St. George’s university hospital, located in Tooting, will bring medicine, pharmacology, biomedical science, allied and global health to complement City’s health offering which includes nursing, midwifery, speech and language therapy, psychology, and optometry.
At City, international students make up approximately 30% of the student population.
In line with the government’s intake targets for home and international medical school places, overseas students at St. George’s are limited to approximately 9% of the cohort. In 2021/22, of the university’s 4,825 total students, 285 were international.
The strategic case for the City St. George’s union was agreed in June 2023, and the finalisation of the plans will end St. George’s 15-year search for a partner after plans to merge with Royal Holloway collapsed in 2021.
The integration of standalone medical schools into other University of London institutions in the 80s and 90s created mergers between Barts and The London with Queen Mary, Royal Free and Middlesex with UCL, and St Mary’s and Charing Cross & Westminster with Imperial College.
These mergers were judged overwhelmingly successful, with the resulting institutions becoming major biomedical providers of research and education on a global scale.
City St. George’s hopes their alliance will “deliver scale, reach, capability, and resilience,” broadening both institutions’ reach in areas of policy, communication, business, management, biomedical engineering and computer science.
