The Griffith Medicine course

Each of the first three trimesters (all of Year 1 and Year 2 Trimester 1) has the same three linked courses, numbered 1 to 3. Foundations of Medicine (20 credit points) teaches the science of a group of body systems. Introduction to Clinical Practice (10 credit points) teaches history taking, examination and procedures. Community Medicine and Professional Practice (10 credit points) covers law, ethics, public health and First Peoples health. In Year 1 Trimester 2, for example, you study the gut, hormones and reproduction while learning to examine them.

The science courses use a flipped classroom: you prepare beforehand and spend class time applying it. At the centre is team-based learning (TBL). In TBL you sit a short readiness test on your own, then the same test with your team, and then apply the material to problems as a group. Lectures, lectorials (part lecture, part tutorial), practicals and small-group tutorials fill out the week.

From the Year 2 capstone, case-based learning (CBL) sessions, where a small group works through a patient case, sit alongside weekly masterclasses and placements. In Years 3 and 4 most learning happens with clinical teams. Seminars, CBL tutorials where you present cases through an online system called OSCAR, and an online lecture series on common conditions back this up. Rural students also meet for hub days of shared teaching.

Griffith Health plans interprofessional learning, learning with students of other health professions, in three stages, from what each profession does to simulated and then real team care. The MD's 2026 course profiles include compulsory interprofessional sessions in Transition to Clinical Practice and an interprofessional practice assignment in Year 4. At the Gold Coast, students also work with other professions in CLEIMS, a team simulation. In 2024 the AMC found interprofessional learning on clinical placements largely opportunistic and set a condition to make it available at every site.

The 2026 Gold Coast timetables for Year 1 Trimester 1 show what a first-year week looks like. The year group is split into six timetable groups, which Griffith calls pathways, so your workshop times depend on your group. Other locations run the same courses with slightly different session numbers: in 2026 there were nine communication skills sessions at the Gold Coast and eight at the Sunshine Coast and Toowoomba.

You need to be available from 7am to 6pm on weekdays, and some activities can fall after hours, at weekends or on public holidays. From Year 1 Trimester 2 the timetable also includes full placement days, 8am to 4.50pm: weekly on Thursdays or on some Tuesdays, depending on your group. In Year 2 Trimester 1 it sets aside Tuesdays and Thursdays. Your own dates are set in Sonia, Griffith Health's online placement system.

Each year level runs to its own calendar. In 2026, Years 3 and 4 started on 7 January, Year 2 on 19 January and Year 1 on 27 January, and every year had a week off at Easter. Years 1 and 2 sat exams in June, then had three to four weeks off until mid July. Their end-of-year exams began on 29 October for Year 2 and 5 November for Year 1, while Year 3's final exams were in late October and Year 4's in early September.

• Monday: Foundations of Medicine lectures from 9am to just before 1pm, and a one-hour Introduction to Clinical Practice lecture at 5pm.
• Tuesday and Thursday: two-hour clinical skills workshops, plus a two-hour Community Medicine and Professional Practice workshop on one of the two days.
• Wednesday: a three-hour Foundations of Medicine practical on most weeks, in the morning or afternoon.
• Friday: a Community Medicine lecture at 8am, Foundations lectures until just before 1pm, and on some weeks a three-hour afternoon tutorial.
• March to May: community placement days off campus, falling on Tuesdays to Thursdays, on dates set in Sonia.

Anatomy is taught within the Foundations of Medicine courses, alongside histology (tissue under the microscope) and pathology. At the Gold Coast it has a whole floor of the 10-storey Ian O'Connor Building, home of the Griffith Health Centre. The floor holds a 240-student anatomy laboratory, a 90-person histology and pathology laboratory, and an Anatomy and Pathology Learning Centre for self-study. The AMC's 2024 report also lists a surgical skills lab.

Teaching uses donor bodies and specimens from Griffith's body donation program, which runs under the Transplantation and Anatomy Act 1979 with a formal consent process. To use the laboratory you must agree to a code of conduct and its rules. In Year 2, for example, the neurology module includes practical sessions on donor and digital resources.

The Sunshine Coast site has no wet lab, the type of lab needed to work with donor bodies. Students there use plastinated specimens (real tissue preserved with plastic), models and an Anatomage table, a touchscreen for virtual dissection. They travel to the wet lab at Griffith's Nathan campus in Brisbane for scheduled sessions, and digital methods first built for the Sunshine Coast are now used at the Gold Coast too.

Anatomy is examined in practical exams. An anatomy exam is worth 15% of Foundations of Medicine 1, and Year 2 has two spotter exams, in which you identify tagged structures on specimens or images, worth 12.5% each.

Your first patients are simulated: actors and community members trained to play patients in clinical skills sessions. Griffith Health recruits and trains them centrally. In 2024 the AMC counted over 150 at the Gold Coast and about 65 registered on the Sunshine Coast. They vary in age, culture, gender and disability, and include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and native speakers of many languages.

Real-world contact starts with a community placement in Year 1 Trimester 1, where you see how community health organisations support people and write a reflective assessment. GP sessions start in Trimester 2. The 2026 course profiles list four that trimester. In Year 2 Trimester 1 they list six at the Gold Coast or four at the Sunshine Coast, alongside bedside teaching, phlebotomy (taking blood) and more community placements.

In Year 2 Trimester 2 you work in community organisations in pairs or small groups, watching multidisciplinary teams manage chronic conditions. From Year 3 you join hospital teams of consultants, registrars (doctors training as specialists), junior doctors and interns, and you are supervised whenever you see patients. You take histories and examine patients yourself, then present them to your supervisor.

In Year 4 you take on more, from clinical reasoning to investigations, management and minor procedures, working increasingly like an intern. Experience with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients varies by site: at the Sunshine Coast, shadowing an Aboriginal Liaison Officer is built into the clinical years. The AMC found these opportunities uneven in 2024 and set Griffith a condition to offer them to every student.

Each course is assessed separately, mixing multiple-choice and short-answer exams, practical anatomy and pathology exams, clinical skills assessments, reflective writing, and individual and group presentations. Written exams run on your own laptop or tablet through ExamSoft's Examplify software, so your device must meet its requirements.

Clinical skills are tested in OSCEs at the end of Year 2 and in Years 3 and 4. Griffith lengthened examiners' marking time from two to three minutes per station in 2023, and in 2024 began giving every student personalised OSCE feedback.

On placement you are assessed in the workplace. In a mini-CEX (mini clinical evaluation exercise) a supervisor watches you with a patient and rates you. OSCAR assesses your case presentations, and the ITA is your supervisor's report on each rotation. In Year 3 these workplace assessments make up 30% of the grade, and all must be submitted.

Progression is block by block: you must pass every course in a block to move on. If you fail one, you repeat only that course at its next offering, on leave of absence until you pass, rather than repeating the year. Most courses offer a supplementary assessment (a second attempt), but in 2026 Introduction to Clinical Practice 2 and 3 and Advanced Communication, Law and Ethics did not. A failed clinical rotation can be made up in a directed rotation at the end of the year.

Attendance counts towards passing. Clinical skills courses need at least 80% of all sessions and 70% of each module, and missing more than two TBL sessions fails a Foundations course. Arriving more than ten minutes late or leaving more than ten minutes early counts as an absence, and no warnings are given. Griffith also benchmarks its exams with other medical schools through two assessment collaborations.

For Years 1 and 2 you stay at your teaching location, with community and GP placements around it. From Year 3 you are assigned to designated hospitals for the whole year, and in Year 4 your critical care, orthopaedic and emergency rotations are in a designated zone. Griffith says sites depend on availability and can include the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Brisbane, Logan and other parts of Queensland and northern New South Wales. Interstate or overseas placements are possible by negotiation.

The main hospitals are Gold Coast University Hospital and those of the Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Service. Some sites are shared with other universities: joint committees plan placements with Bond University at Gold Coast Health and Tweed Valley, and with the University of Queensland at QEII. Placements are unpaid, and you pay your own travel, accommodation and other placement costs.

Before placements start, you submit Fit for Professional Practice checks through Sonia in your first trimester. They include vaccinations (a new hepatitis B course can take up to five months), a police check and a Queensland Blue Card for work with children. You also need first aid and CPR certificates and online modules, including First Peoples cultural awareness training.

Rural training runs through Griffith's Rural Clinical School with RuralMedEd, a not-for-profit organisation started by rural doctors that has partnered Griffith since 2010. Year 3 Longlook is 42 weeks in one hospital, about 35 hours a week, with exams at your site or in Toowoomba and two days a month of hub teaching in Toowoomba. RuralMedEd coordinates student housing, which cost about $75 a week at many sites in 2025.

ShortLook is a six-week placement in a rural general practice or Aboriginal medical service, used for the Year 4 general practice block; the AMC counted about 65 students a year in 2024. In Years 1 and 2, LittleLook offers sponsored places at rural medical conferences, site visits and two-week summer observerships at Longlook hospitals, which draw more applicants than places.

Published sources disagree on two points. GEMSAS, the graduate-entry application system, presents Toowoomba as a new teaching location for 2027, and the course page calls it the new Toowoomba location. But a page for 2026 starters, the 2026 Year 1 course pages and Sonia already show a Toowoomba Year 1. The course page also lists only 27 placement hours in Year 1 and 35 in Year 2, against up to 1,260 in Year 3 and 1,225 in Year 4. Yet the 2026 timetables set aside full placement days in both early years.

Your chosen placements come in Year 4. A selective is a closely supervised clinical placement where you work much like a junior intern; in 2026 it was usually local and picked from a list the School organises. An elective lets you explore an interest: you usually arrange it yourself, and it can be local, interstate or overseas.

The AMC's 2024 report listed elective options run by Griffith, such as advanced surgical and clinical anatomy, medical education, and rural research or education in Toowoomba. It said the selective and elective would become four weeks long in the new final year, but in 2026 each still ran for six weeks. Longlook students take their elective in Block 7, and it need not be rural. Their selective is a rural generalist or rural specialist placement, which can include up to ten days at another rural site.

Overseas, PNG LukLuk is a six-week elective at Balimo and Morehead Hospitals in Western Province, Papua New Guinea, planned for two students per rotation at each hospital. RuralMedEd runs it with the PNG Sustainable Development Program and Griffith. Pre-departure teaching covers malaria, tuberculosis, dengue, HIV and local culture; in the country you work in emergency, theatre, maternity and the wards under local doctors, and join health outreach to remote villages.

The research route Griffith offers alongside the MD is the MD/PhD pathway, for 5 to 10 students. After Years 1 and 2 you take two years' leave from the MD for a full-time PhD in clinical research. You then complete Years 3 and 4 while continuing the PhD part-time, six years in all. Bedside teaching continues during the PhD to ease your return, and PhD scholarships are open to you. International students on a student visa cannot take this pathway.

Fields named include neuropsychiatry, pathology, neurology, primary health care, health economics, cardiology, Indigenous health, medical education and medical ethics. You need a Distinction-level Year 1 result and must meet research degree entry rules, such as first-class or second-class (Division A) Honours, a research masters or a research record. Expressions of interest close on 1 December in Year 1, and applications on 1 June in Year 2.

At the Gold Coast, practicals, many workshops and the main lectures are held in the Griffith Health Centre, next to Gold Coast University Hospital. In CLEIMS, an extended simulation in clinical skills rooms, students from several health courses manage three patients through a hospital stay and discharge home, then reflect as a group. The AMC reported Gold Coast Year 4 students doing it in 2024.

The Sunshine Coast Health Institute is shared by the Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Service, UniSC (the University of the Sunshine Coast), TAFE Queensland and Griffith. UniSC describes simulation suites at the institute that copy the hospital's operating suite, an intensive care room, a birthing suite and an emergency resuscitation bay. In 2024 the AMC praised the Sunshine Coast simulation facilities used by Griffith's MD students.

In Toowoomba, teaching is at the Rural Clinical School, 190 Hume Street, East Toowoomba. RuralMedEd has built clinical training centres at Stanthorpe, Warwick, Kingaroy and Dalby hospitals and in Chinchilla, and owns student housing in several towns. Toowoomba-stream students live at the Swallow Court Unit Complex: up to 17 residents in individual bedrooms with a shared kitchen and living areas, a 30-minute walk from the town centre.

Griffith flags students at risk from attendance, marks, mid-trimester results or a return from leave, then offers near-peer tutoring, study skills workshops, wellbeing referrals or a personalised learning plan. Near-peer mentors are senior MD students employed by the School. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students also have the GUMURRII Student Success Unit, which assigns a support officer to medical students and a near-peer mentor to each First Nations medical student.

On placement, Medical Student Placement Managers organise and support students at the main sites, and Clinical Sub Deans represent the School in the hospitals. The Griffith University Medicine Society (GUMS), the student society, has advocacy officers at each clinical site who help with confidential reports. The Dean also meets site managers weekly in a group called the Solution Squad to catch student problems early.

Wellbeing services are mostly university-wide, including a 24/7 mental wellbeing support line that the AMC found students trusted across sites, and Sunshine Coast students can also use UniSC services. At its 2024 visit the AMC noted the MD had lost its own student support officer, so course convenors, who also assess you, were the first point of contact. It recommended a separate support role.