Professor Hamde Nazar, Royal College of Surgeons Ireland and Newcastle University, on how the CATE 2026 winner, Young@Heart clinic, turns pharmacy students into community health champions.

8,000 health checks.  

700 students.  

4 published papers, and counting.  

Since 2019, a small stall in Newcastle’s Grainger Market has quietly become one of the busiest classrooms at our university, and one of the city’s most trusted health services. 

The Young@Heart (Y@H) clinic offers free cardiovascular screening, checking blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose and Body Mass Index, alongside advice on healthier lifestyle choices and signposting to other services, such as smoking cessation support. What makes it different is who runs it: undergraduate pharmacy students, supervised by academic staff, deliver the entire service themselves. 

We set up Y@H to solve two problems at once. Clinical placements for pharmacy students were becoming harder to find, at the same time as we saw real unmet health need in our local community. Rather than treat these as separate issues, we built a clinic that addresses both, giving students authentic clinical experience while taking preventative health care directly to the people who need it most. 

Students in the driving seat 

What sets Y@H apart is that students run it, not just staff it. They manage the daily rota, triage patients, interpret results, make clinical decisions, and have the difficult conversations about lifestyle change, all under supervision, but with real ownership. Along the way they build skills that go well beyond the pharmacy curriculum: time management, delegation, teamwork and confidence under pressure. 

One student summed up the shift in themselves plainly: “my technique and my consultation skills have definitely got a lot better… I’m so confident with doing what I’m doing.” Another spoke about the sense of purpose the clinic gives them: “providing this service to people feels good, that we can give back to the public.” 

A ripple effect beyond pharmacy 

What started as a pharmacy initiative has grown well beyond it. Students from sports and exercise science now take part, as do international students from our partner institution, Loyola. The model has also travelled further afield: schools of pharmacy at De Montfort and Liverpool John Moores, and medical schools at Warwick and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, have adopted versions of the Y@H approach. Members of the team were recently invited to share the model with educators across NHS Scotland. 

None of this happened by accident. From the outset, the clinic has been built on genuine co-creation: academic, technical and research colleagues working alongside students to shape everything from clinic design to evaluation. When we opened a dedicated clinic space in Grainger Market in 2024, we deliberately sought input from local authority partners, third-sector organisations and students themselves, to make sure the space worked for the public as well as for learning. 

Making a difference where it matters most 

The clinic’s community impact is where the numbers really land. In one evaluation of over 1,150 people, a third came from the most deprived areas of the North East, a group with high rates of overweight and obesity (62%), raised cholesterol (36%) and high blood pressure (44%). Encouragingly, people’s intentions to change their health behaviour increased significantly after visiting the clinic. 

That reach continues to grow through partnerships with HealthWorks, the Action Foundation, St Vincent’s Centre and Newcastle GP Partners, as well as a community health bus that takes the service to people who might otherwise face barriers to care. Local press coverage of the clinic and the health bus reflects just how much this work matters to the city, not just the university. 

Evidence at the core 

We’ve made a point of evaluating everything we do, and it shows: four published papers (with three more under review), presentations at international conferences, and award nominations including the THE Awards and the Academic Health Science Network’s Bright Ideas in Health Awards. That evidence base means the model isn’t just a nice story, it’s a replicable blueprint that other institutions can adapt with confidence. 

Six years on, Y@H has shown that clinical education and community benefit don’t have to be traded off against each other. Give students real responsibility, build genuine partnerships, and measure what happens, and you can improve outcomes for students and the public at the same time. 

Could a similar model work in your discipline, or your institution? 

Hamde Nazar is Professor of Pharmacy and Deputy Head of School at Royal College of Surgeons and leads the Young@Heart student-led clinic team, researching student-led service learning and clinical pharmacy education.