The Bond Medicine course

Everything you study sits under four themes that run through all five years. Scientist and Scholar covers science, research and critical appraisal, and Clinical Practice covers communication, examination and procedures. Health and Society includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and planetary health, and Professionalism and Leadership covers ethics, law and self-care. The AMC calls the design a spiral curriculum: topics come back each year in more depth.

In Years 1 and 2 you learn mostly through problem-based learning (PBL), in which a small group works through a patient case and uses it to decide what it needs to learn. Each week opens with a new case, and that week's lectures, labs and clinical skills sessions are built around it, so the timetable changes weekly and is released at the weekend. The AMC found in 2025 that small-group teaching usually runs at about four students per staff member.

Year 3 switches to clinician-led case-based learning in Bond Virtual Healthcare, Bond's simulated patient program. Small groups work through realistic cases, partly in student-led tutorials and partly with experienced clinicians who facilitate and give feedback. Students told the AMC it was a safe, low-stakes place to practise.

In Years 4 and 5 most learning happens on placement as part of a clinical team, with on-site teaching such as weekly topic sessions in child health and women's health. Bond adds timetabled sessions, including back-to-base sessions that bring the whole cohort onto campus, and you build an MD e-Portfolio of research and clinical activities.

Bond's FAQ gives a guide to a first-semester week in Year 1. It includes 4 to 6 hours of small-group problem-based tutorials, 3 to 4 hours of clinical sessions, 5 to 6 hours of lectures, 3 hours of lab work and 2 hours of interactive sessions. Classes usually run from around 8 or 9am to 4 or 5pm. The 2026 Year 1 outlines also budget about 380 to 390 hours of personal study per subject, more than 30 hours a week.

In Year 3 each subject includes about 66 hours of Bond Virtual Healthcare tutorials, roughly 5 to 6 hours a week, alongside lectures, workshops, clinical sessions and simulation.

From Year 4 a normal week is five days on placement, and each MD subject budgets 539 hours of work-based training over 14 weeks. Emergency medicine rosters include evenings, nights and weekends. The Advanced Clinical Skills Rotation adds ward call shifts, working with the doctors who respond to calls about patients on the wards. In Year 5 general practice, most Wednesdays are teaching days at Bond.

Anatomy is part of the integrated Year 1 and 2 subjects rather than a separate course. In Year 1 you learn how the body is organised into systems, cavities and regions. In Year 2 you study each organ's relations, blood and nerve supply and lymph drainage, and how the body systems develop in the embryo. You also learn to recognise structures shown in different ways and apply them to clinical problems.

Practical classes take place in the Dr John Kearney Anatomy Laboratory, which is fitted to handle human cadaveric material and holds anatomical models and microscopes; it is also used for extra study. At its 2025 visit the AMC noted a wide range of anatomical and prosection specimens, meaning body parts already dissected by experts. Anatomy returns later in applied form, such as airway anatomy in the Advanced Clinical Skills Rotation.

Your first patients are simulated ones, as you learn history-taking and how to observe healthy and unwell people. Real-world contact in Year 1 comes through a community or volunteering placement (12 hours over two or three sessions) and a four-hour visit to a residential aged care facility. Year 2 adds three four-hour visits to public and private hospital clinics, one in each subject.

Year 3 brings your first general practice placement: six sessions on three Tuesdays. Bond's 2026 placement guide for GPs says students can take a history on their own and, under supervision, do basic checks such as blood pressure and urine tests. They have not yet been trained in mental health. You also have two hospital clinic sessions, a full day at The Wesley Hospital in Brisbane and ward visits.

From Year 4 you are on full-time placement as part of the team. You clerk new patients, taking their full history and examination on admission, join ward rounds, clinics and theatre, and take on handover and discharge summaries as you progress.

In Years 1 to 3 you are assessed through written exams, clinical practice assessments, assignments and pass-or-fail competency tasks. Progression is decided at the end of each year. You must reach the pass mark in each type of assessment separately, so strong exam results cannot make up for falling short in clinical assessments. Written exams are taken on computer through ExamSoft, which gives you a personalised performance report.

Clinical skills are tested in clinical practice assessments in Years 1 and 2 and an OSCE at the end of Year 3. Each OSCE station tests one task, such as taking a history or examining a patient, often with an actor as the patient. The Year 3 OSCE is the final check on your clinical safety before the MD.

Every MD subject is a competency-based, ungraded pass: you reach the standard or you do not, with no marks. On each placement your supervisors record workplace-based assessments in Osler, Bond's online ePortfolio, including in-training assessments of your overall performance. Hospital rotations add four mini-CEX, where a clinician watches you take a history, examine a patient or plan management and rates you.

Most rotations also set a clerked case. You take a full history and examination from a patient and write it up in no more than 1,500 words, with a problem list, a care plan and a letter to the GP. You then present it to your supervisor. A Board of Examiners reviews all of this, with your attendance and professionalism, before deciding whether you pass each placement.

Knowledge is tested by five computer-based Progress Tests, partly open-book, one at the end of each of the first five MD subjects. Your combined score on the first three must reach the pass mark by the end of Year 4. In Year 5 you must pass the fifth test and reach the pass mark on the last two combined. The MD OSCE at the end of Year 4 checks that you are safe to start final year, with one repeat, if needed, the next time it is offered in Year 5.

Bond's 2026 Rules of Assessment and Progression set out what happens if you fail. In Years 1 to 3, a student who fails a year may be offered pass-or-fail resit exams covering the whole year, and may otherwise be allowed to repeat it. You get two attempts at any subject: failing the same subject twice, or failing a year and then the next, leads to exclusion. The whole program must be finished within seven years of starting.

• Mini-CEX use a four-level entrustment scale; below Level 3 (competent with minimal supervisor input), the task must be repeated before the placement ends.
• MD e-Portfolio points for research and evidence-based practice build up in stages: 15 by the end of Year 3, 40 by the end of Year 4 and 100 by the end of Year 5. Missing the points due in an MD subject means failing that subject.
• Before graduating you need 11 procedural skills signed off on real patients, from IV cannulation and suturing to blood cultures and bag-and-mask ventilation. The AMC reported that Bond plans to grow its list of required skills and tasks from 17 in 2026 to 20 over five years.
• Other requirements include clinical tasks such as a discharge summary and a First Nations cultural safety assessment, plus Advanced Life Support, ultrasound and intimate examination training.
• Bond's 2026 documents disagree about the prescribing exam. The Year 5 outlines call the Prescribing Safely Assessment formative (one adds compulsory and invigilated). The 2026 Rules call it the Prescribing Skills Assessment and require a pass, with one repeat, then an alternative task if needed. The AMC's report says it was to count for graduation from 2026.
• You can fail a placement for unprofessional behaviour, or for poor attendance even if your supervisor's overall assessment is good.
• In the MD only one failed placement can be repeated across Year 4 and the first Year 5 subject, and the repeat may take up an elective or selective slot. A second failed placement, or any failed placement in the last two subjects, means failing that subject.
• Failing a placement can also cost you a capstone or elective placement, even one already arranged, and so can recorded attendance or behaviour problems.
• The MD OSCE must be passed: failing it and its repeat means a 14-week remedial Special Topic Subject of mentored clinical work. After failing any MD subject you may be allowed to repeat it or take a Special Topic Subject, but failing that second attempt can lead to exclusion.
• In February 2026 the AMC required a formal process for timely, individual OSCE feedback during 2026, after finding that OSCE feedback had fallen short of expectations.

Placements in Years 1 to 3 are short. The faculty allocates community placements within commuting distance of Bond and posts them on iLearn, Bond's online learning system, one to two weeks before each semester. GP placements in Years 3 and 5 are arranged with the Gold Coast Primary Health Network.

For the MD you may be placed in public, private or not-for-profit hospitals and health services, mostly in Brisbane, South-East Queensland and Northern New South Wales, with some rural and overseas options. Bond sends a preference survey around August in Years 3 and 4 and emails allocations by about October. It cannot always meet preferences, and allocations can change.

You pay your own placement travel and accommodation, and Bond does not treat either as grounds for special arrangements, though serious health problems or caring responsibilities can be. At its 2025 visit the AMC noted that Bond does not cover accommodation for placements in Brisbane, the Tweed or the Gold Coast, and that students had raised rising accommodation costs and transport difficulties.

Bond's Child Health and Women's Health handbooks, revised in September 2026, also describe Integrated Clinical Placements, which differ from the standard rotations. A group of students spends 14 weeks together, seven focused on women's health and seven on child health, mixing hospital wards with general practice, private paediatric clinics, urgent care, family planning and IVF clinics. One women's health day is at Marie Stopes International, focused on termination of pregnancy, and there are no make-up sessions.

Rural placements are currently chosen as a capstone, elective or selective. In 2025 the AMC found a lack of structured regional, rural and remote learning and required Bond to introduce it in 2028. It also noted plans for more placements across Northern New South Wales.

• Before any placement you must meet Queensland and New South Wales Health requirements. They include police and Blue Card (working with children) checks, National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) worker screening, vaccinations and first aid training, all kept current on Osler. A lapsed requirement stops you attending placement.

Most choice comes in Year 5. In the selective you pick a clinical service with one of Bond's placement providers to go deeper into a specialty or subspecialty. Bond publishes placement handbooks for specialties you can choose, from anaesthetics, cardiology and ENT to orthopaedics, palliative care, radiology and urology.

The two electives are placements you organise yourself, in Australia or overseas, to see care in a different setting or explore a field. A Bond story about a student due to graduate in 2025 describes his electives in the emergency department of Charing Cross Hospital in London and in transplant surgery at Cambridge University Hospitals. A GP elective means 56 sessions over seven weeks.

Eligible students can use one elective for a capstone, applying clinical and research skills where resources are limited, and it can also serve as the MD project. The AMC reported that Bond partly covers flights, accommodation and transport for international capstones with a stipend. In 2023, 22 students spent six weeks in the Solomon Islands, first at the National Referral Hospital in Honiara, then four weeks at Gizo Hospital or Helena Goldie Hospital in Munda.

Rural placements are another option. Bond's 2026 Rural handbook says they often bring more clinical variety and closer supervision than city hospitals. A 2022 Bond news story followed a student who volunteered for a final-year rural placement based in Charleville, working with the Royal Flying Doctor Service and visiting towns such as Thargomindah and Windorah.

Campus teaching uses the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine building at Robina, home to the anatomy laboratory and health science laboratories, along with clinical skills rooms equipped like real clinical settings. The Simulation Ward is a 12-bed mock ward that can be set up as anything from a rural outback hospital to a large city hospital. The Pathology Museum holds diseased specimens with their case histories.

The CERC, on the ground floor of Robina Hospital, is a joint project of Bond and Queensland Health, with a 100-seat lecture theatre, clinical skills laboratories and tutorial rooms. It is accredited as an affiliate skills centre of the Queensland Health Skills Development Service, and its teaching includes ward rounds with simulated participants.

The Tweed Education Hub, a short walk from Tweed Valley Hospital, adds space for teaching and simulation. At the AMC's 2025 visit, extensions to the CERC and the Health Sciences and Medicine building were under way to support projected growth in student numbers. A Futures Building with another anatomy laboratory was also planned.

Each phase has Student Support Leads as a first point of contact, and the faculty's Office of Student Affairs and Service Quality (SASQ) handles academic progress, extensions, learning access plans and appeals. Support is kept separate from progress decisions: MD support leads can give context, but the Board of Examiners decides.

You have free, confidential counselling, including access to a clinical psychologist, a Wellbeing Curriculum on stress, burnout and coping, and Mental Health First Aid training. In 2025 some students told the AMC that counsellors were hard to reach. On placement, Clinical Placement Coaches can help students who need academic support, and Bond-funded Sub-Deans, all senior clinicians, oversee the student and staff experience at the major teaching sites.

The Medical Students Society of Bond University (MSSBU) runs orientation for each intake and represents students to the faculty. Bushfire, the Bond rural health club, supports students from rural backgrounds, and BondAbility supports students with disabilities, including on placement.

The Nyombil Indigenous Support Centre offers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students culturally safe support and free peer tutoring. In 2025 the AMC found it under-resourced and heard that some First Nations students had experienced racism without knowing how to report it. It set conditions, due in 2026 and 2027, to strengthen culturally safe support.