The Deakin Medicine course

In Years 1 and 2 you learn through problem-based learning (PBL), interactive sessions and hands-on laboratory and clinical experiences. In PBL a small group works through a clinical problem, decides what it needs to learn, then applies that learning back to the case. Teaching happens both on campus and online.

In Years 1 and 2, each semester is one unit split into two blocks, each built around a topic, such as Human Biology, or a body system, such as Cardiovascular and Respiratory. The last block of Year 2 instead prepares you for clinical school. Four themes run through every block: Medical Science and Clinical Practice; Public Health Medicine; Ethics, Law and Professionalism; and Indigenous Health. The school describes its curriculum as spiralled and integrated: the themes come back each year at a higher level and are taught side by side within each block.

When the AMC assessed the school in 2018, each week of Years 1 and 2 centred on a new clinical scenario. PBL sessions with a facilitator opened the week's case and drew it together at the end. Lectures, practicals, role-plays, clinical skills sessions, simulations and workshops covered the content the case raised.

From Year 3 you learn mainly as a member of clinical teams, with formal teaching organised by your site, as the next section describes.

Years 1 and 2 are full time. Each unit expects you to attend all learning activities, typically the equivalent of 40 hours a week covering clinical activities, formal teaching, personal reflection and self-directed study. That adds up to about 600 hours per semester. The school aims to publish timetables before each semester so you can plan work, caring or health commitments around them.

In Years 3 and 4 your week depends on your site and rotation. At Geelong – Barwon you join ward rounds, clinics and theatre with your team of junior doctors, registrars and consultants, plus lectures, bedside teaching and clinical skills sessions. Ballarat – Grampians says to expect around 20 to 30 hours a week on site. At Warrnambool – South West, ward work is paired with a formal teaching program.

Deakin describes a Rural Communities week like this. You have weekly parallel consulting sessions in your general practice, where you assess patients yourself and then work through their care with your clinical mentor. Fortnightly online tutorials and case discussions run alongside a fortnightly regional teaching day of bedside tutorials, clinical teaching and specialist consulting sessions, plus time in urgent care and on ward rounds.

The year starts in January. In 2027, Year 1 and 2 teaching runs from 18 January to 29 October, with an exam week at the end of each semester, in June and November. Years 3 and 4 start a week earlier, on 11 January, and Year 3 teaching runs to 5 November.

Patient contact starts in your first semester. That semester's unit, Medicine 1A, includes a series of clinical placements. Deakin's course pages say you gain clinical experience early through placements with healthcare providers. A Deakin medical academic describes these early placements as short tasters with general practitioners, in hospitals, in allied health and in community care.

Before that first placement you need a police check and a Working with Children Check, which Deakin asks for when you start the course. The police check must then be valid before placements in each calendar year. Without these checks you cannot go on placement, which holds up your progress. You also declare your immunisation status, and a health service can turn away a student whose immunisation status it does not accept.

Alongside placements you practise clinical and procedural skills in a simulated environment, and your interviews and examinations of patients are assessed from Year 1. Semester 2 of Year 1 adds rural placements, and placements continue through both semesters of Year 2.

Year 2 ends with Transition to Clinical Practice. This block gets you ready to join a clinical school and to start seeing patients safely under supervision.

In Years 3 and 4 you take on real clinical tasks with patients, their families and the wider care team, guided by staff at your site. By the end of Year 4 you should be able to carry out the clinical procedures expected of a junior doctor, safely and with skill.

Every unit in the MD is assessed on an ungraded pass or fail basis, so you pass or fail without a mark or grade. You must pass every unit and every component within it. In Medicine 1A, 1B and 2A you must pass each of the unit's two blocks, judged on your cumulative result across the block's tasks. In 1A and 2A that means at least 50% of the available marks.

Some units add further hurdles. Medicine 2A also requires passes in a minimum number of tasks in each block. Medicine 2B is judged across the whole unit instead: you need 50% overall across its eight main tasks, passes in at least six of them and a pass in the Clinical Practice Passport. Year 1 also includes a Human Research Ethics Quiz that you must complete.

Written tests include 45-minute intra-semester tests and two-hour end-of-semester exams. They mix multiple-choice questions (MCQs), extended matching questions (EMQs, where you match cases to answers from a long list) and short-answer questions (SAQs). Practical exams can mean 25 short-answer stations of 90 seconds each. Reports, reflections and ethics tests run alongside. Public health team-based learning sessions also count towards block results.

Clinical skills are assessed with patients and on video. Year 1 includes a recorded patient interview with a reflective piece, and a 14-minute in-person patient appointment followed by documenting your findings. Year 2 adds a clinical examination with handover, a clinical practice interview and an eight-minute Indigenous health communication video.

In Years 3 and 4 each year's two units are graded together at the end of the year, with a holding result of XA (not yet assessed) after the first semester. To start Year 4 you must pass four Year 3 hurdles. They are the Evidence Application Assessment (EAA), a three-hour paper of MCQs, EMQs and SAQs; the Research Scholar Program tasks; your workplace-based assessments; and an OSCE.

In the OSCE you move through 12 timed stations, each testing one clinical task, and you need 50% overall and passes in at least seven stations. Workplace-based assessments happen during real clinical work: the mini-CEX, where a supervisor watches you with a patient; case-based discussions; direct observation of procedural skills; and, in Year 3, in-training assessments. Year 4 repeats the EAA and adds TIPS and a two-hour Prescribing Skills Assessment of online multiple-choice and practical prescribing questions.

• Some exam items are shared with other medical schools through the Australian Medical Schools Assessment Collaboration (AMSAC) and the Australasian Collaboration for Clinical Assessment in Medicine (ACCLAiM), so Deakin can benchmark its students' results.
• Deakin's 2027 dates page sets aside further end-of-unit assessment periods, with the school notifying the students involved.

For Years 1 and 2, General Entry Stream students are based at the Geelong Waurn Ponds Campus. Rural Training Stream students are based at Deakin's Warrnambool Campus or East Grampians Health Service in Ararat, with occasional days at Waurn Ponds. Their teaching mixes online and face-to-face learning, with at least one to two days a week in person. They give a preference between the two sites after accepting their offer, but it is not guaranteed.

For Years 3 and 4 everyone moves to the Deakin Medical School sites below. For Rural Training Stream students, Deakin says allocation happens during Year 2, using their preferences and the places available, regardless of where they studied in Years 1 and 2. These students are allocated to one or more of Ballarat – Grampians, Warrnambool – South West and Rural Communities, and must live at their site.

The Rural Training Stream is a firm commitment. When you accept a place you sign a declaration to train rurally for all four years. You cannot transfer to the general stream, and leaving the stream means giving up your place in the course.

Rural Communities works differently from the hospital-based sites. Once allocated there, you list your preferred towns and the classmates you would like to be placed with, and Deakin decides using everyone's preferences, so no town is guaranteed. Students learn in groups of two to five per town. Face-to-face intensive teaching weeks come about every six weeks in Warrnambool, Ballarat or Geelong, with accommodation provided, and you receive a travel allowance each semester for local travel.

Deakin's own pages disagree on some details of Rural Communities. The sites overview mentions nine locations and the School's Study with us page 10 rural community clinical sites, while the Rural Communities page lists fourteen towns supported by nine rural hospitals. The Rural Training Stream page adds that the locations are subject to change. The Rural Communities page also says its students complete Year 4 at another clinical school, but the 2027 Year 4 units list Rural Communities among the Year 4 sites.

Housing depends on the site. Geelong – Barwon students can use student accommodation at the Geelong Waterfront Campus. Deakin owns six four-bedroom houses within 5 km of the Warrnambool medical school that medical students can rent. Ballarat has no Deakin accommodation, so students rent privately. Deakin says its rural community sites offer on-site accommodation, and Deakin Rural Health rents furnished shared houses to students on placement in nine western Victorian towns, free in Ararat.

The 2027 handbook's Year 4 units do not list an elective: the year is made up of the five named rotations, an Extended Studies Program and the Pre-Internship. Earlier editions of the same unit, in 2023 and 2024, did list an Elective, so older descriptions of a Deakin elective may not match the course you would take. If an elective matters to you, check the current handbook and ask the school.

The only unit the course structure labels an optional elective is the MD Extracurricular Research Program (HME090), described in the next section. Most of your remaining choices are about place and research. If you are allocated to Rural Communities you preference towns and classmates, and Rural Training Stream students give their Year 3 and 4 site preferences in Year 2. Everyone frames their own research question in the Research Scholar Program.

Research is built into the MD itself. Deakin developed the Research Scholar Program when the course moved from a bachelor-level degree to the MD. In Year 3 you search and critically appraise the literature, identify a gap, frame a specific research question and design a research proposal. In Year 4 you write up and present the work for academic, professional and public audiences.

You can add more through the optional MD Extracurricular Research Program (HME090), a zero-credit unit for joining a research project alongside your core studies. You can enrol at the start of any semester after completing Medicine 1A, and the first-semester requirement can be waived if you have already completed research such as an Honours year. You find the project and the supervisor yourself.

To enrol you need good academic standing, the online Human Research Ethics module, a project outline naming the supervisors and your role, ethics approval for the project and any required safety training. A project takes 40 to 80 hours in the semester, and you are assessed on an 800-word reflection or on outcomes the unit chair approves.

If you leave after passing Years 1 and 2, you can exit with a Master of Health and Medical Sciences (H720). It does not lead to registration as a doctor, and students on the International Medical University pathway cannot take it.

For General Entry Stream students, Years 1 and 2 are taught in Deakin's $53 million purpose-built medical facilities at the Geelong Waurn Ponds Campus, which include simulation spaces for medicine, optometry and medical imaging. You learn in simulated clinical environments and medical science teaching spaces, with small-group sessions alongside. The facilities are in a precinct within walking distance of Epworth HealthCare's private hospital. Rural Training Stream students are based in Warrnambool or Ararat and come to Waurn Ponds occasionally.

Deakin Residential Services has seven two-bedroom terraces in the Waurn Ponds health precinct reserved for Doctor of Medicine students, each with private ensuite bedrooms and a shared kitchen and living area. Deakin says its housing for medical students in the precinct offers regular study sessions and exam and assignment debriefs.

At Geelong – Barwon, the medical school has procedure, simulation and ward rooms for teaching and practising clinical skills, and students can use the Barwon Health Library in Kitchener House. Deakin SimReady, the School of Medicine's simulation team, is based at the Geelong medical school. It runs simulation training for learners from students to qualified clinicians, in areas such as life support, deteriorating patients, airway management and communication.

At the Warrnambool campus, medical and nursing students train on Syn-D, a synthetic cadaver introduced in 2026 with support from Peter's Project Foundation. It mimics tissues, bones, muscles, organs and blood vessels, and can be dissected and put back together. The Foundation also funds scholarships for Year 1 and 2 medical students studying in Warrnambool.

At Ararat, East Grampians Health Service opened a practical laboratory in September 2025 that it shares with Deakin and Federation TAFE. It is laid out like a hospital ward, with two four-bed patient wards, patient bathrooms, medication rooms, a simulation lab and a break-out room. When it opened, the health service said 30 Rural Training Stream students were studying in Ararat across Years 1 and 2.

The School of Medicine provides a counsellor who offers mental health support specifically to medical students. In the AMC's 2025 report, the school describes a support team that gives academic advice and individual support, and close work with Deakin's Disability Resource Centre and Academic Support Unit. If you have a disability or health condition, the school invites you to discuss the course requirements and reasonable adjustments confidentially.

The Damion Drapac Centre for Equity in Health Professions Education, within the School, runs the Damion Drapac Access Fund. This small, flexible fund helps medical students facing personal or financial hardship. Past examples include unexpected medical costs, moving to a new clinical learning site and childcare during rescheduled assessments. The Centre also runs a scholarship covering the whole degree for students from under-represented groups facing financial barriers.

The AMC's 2025 report notes an Indigenous Health academic and professional team formed to support Indigenous medical students. Deakin also offers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students culturally specific services, including orientation, tutoring, mentoring, financial support and social and emotional wellbeing support.

Student groups include MeDUSA, the Deakin Medical Students' Association, which works closely with the course team, and NOMAD, Deakin's rural health club. Some sites add their own support: at Eastern Health each student has a senior doctor as an academic mentor, with practice exams and OSCE bootcamps.