The Melbourne Medicine course

The course is organised around three domains that run through every year: applied biomedical science, clinical skills and professional practice. Three themes are built into all of them: First Nations health, population and global health, and research methods. The current version of the course is a redesign that the school launched in 2022.

Year 1 takes a body-systems approach. Biomedical science is introduced through clinically focused cases that small groups explore together, so the structure and function of each body system are learned in the context of a patient's health. Webinars, interactive online modules, tutorials and practical classes support the cases, while clinical skills are built through peer learning, simulation and placements.

From Year 2 most of your learning happens on placement, complemented by small-group tutorials, simulation, clinical and procedural skills teaching, and interactive online learning. In the final semester, teaching aims to connect everything you have learned to safe, effective practice.

The workload is full time throughout. The handbook expects you to attend for 30 to 40 hours a week, for up to 40 weeks a year. You must study full time and continuously, because each year's subjects build steadily across the year.

You start meeting patients in Year 1. Foundations for Clinical Practice includes longitudinal placements in community and hospital settings, meaning regular placements spread across the year rather than one-off visits.

Part of this happens in general practice. In Year 1 you spend twelve days in a general practice, one Tuesday or Thursday a fortnight from March to October. At least half of each day is spent with your GP supervisor. The school's general practice department says this is the first chance many students get to work with real patients.

From Year 2 you are on placement full time, first in hospital teams and then, in Year 3, in community settings too, with patients of every age. By the end of the course the handbook expects you to be able to take blood, suture a wound and insert an intravenous cannula.

In Year 3 you return to general practice for a six-week block of 20 hours a week. You take part in everything the practice does, including more advanced history-taking and examination with some consulting on your own, chronic disease plans and home visits. Your GP supervisor assesses you formally three times. In 2024, 269 practices across Victoria signed up to host the department's MD students, and a quarter of placements were in rural clinics.

The final semester, Transition to Practice, is the last step before internship, your first supervised year of work as a doctor, known as PGY1 (postgraduate year one).

The handbook describes the MD as an ungraded course: each subject is passed or failed rather than marked. The school's stated aims are to lower stress, support wellbeing and longer-term learning, encourage collaboration and help you develop your identity as a doctor. A faculty subject taken as a Discovery subject, known as a Faculty Selective, follows its own school's rules and may show a grade on your transcript.

Pass or fail still means meeting set standards. Pass marks for standardised assessments, such as multiple-choice exams and Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), are set by formal standard-setting methods. An OSCE is a circuit of timed stations, each testing one clinical task. Workplace-based assessments, where a clinician rates your work with real patients, and written assignments use a five-point scale, with satisfactory as the minimum.

Knowledge is tested cumulatively. Cumulative Achievement Tests check your core knowledge as the course builds up, and the 2025 handbook shows they continue beyond Year 1: in Year 3 you sit the seventh. Progress tests compare your knowledge with the standard expected at graduation.

The 2025 handbook entry for Principles of Clinical Practice 3 shows what a clinical year involves. Most items are hurdles: requirements you must meet to pass the subject, whatever your other results. Year 3 includes:

• Written papers: Cumulative Achievement Test 7 and a short-answer exam, each 120 minutes, in the exam period, plus two 180-minute progress tests during the year, neither of which has a pass mark.
• A multi-station OSCE at the end of the year.
• Two Standardised Case Based Discussions, structured oral discussions of a case, one mid-year and one at the end of the year.
• At least 10 mini-CEX assessments, two per term, in which a clinician observes you with a patient, plus three mini-CEX assessed by peers.
• At least 20 workplace-based assessments across the year, with a minimum of four per term.
• A 90-minute Situational Judgement Test, which asks how you would act in workplace scenarios, plus a procedural skills requirement and a portfolio.
• A professional behaviour hurdle covering observed behaviour, the Situational Judgement Test, an academic integrity quiz and attendance at teaching and placements.

You are allocated to a clinical school region when you are offered a place, and accepting the offer means accepting that region; it cannot be appealed. Under the procedure in force since 2025, domestic applicants list a preference and places are filled in random-number order, with Rural places going first to those who chose Rural. International and New Zealand students can only be placed in the Metropolitan region, and Rural Pathway students are allocated to Rural.

Within your region you are given a primary clinical school. Metropolitan students find out within their first two weeks and stay there for Years 2 to 4. Those who say they want Northern or Western are given priority there, and everyone else is allocated by an automated random process. Later changes are possible only in exceptional, unforeseen circumstances; travel time, not having a car, part-time work and housing do not count.

There is some movement between regions. Domestic students in Commonwealth Supported Places (government-subsidised places) who start in the Metropolitan region can ask to move to Rural for Years 2 to 4, if rural sites have room. The handbook also says rural rotations are open to all students. Rural Clinical School students outside the Rural Pathway may be re-allocated after Year 2. In 2022 the AMC found that these students spent Year 1 in Melbourne, with weekly placements alternating between the Royal Children's Hospital and general practice.

The Rural Pathway keeps you rural for the whole course, apart from the yearly Student Conference in Melbourne. Year 1 is in Shepparton, and for Year 2 you state a preference between Shepparton, Wangaratta and Echuca. Year 3 is a year-long placement based in one general practice clinic in north-east Victoria, and Year 4 is at Ballarat, Echuca, Shepparton or Wangaratta. Its listed locations are Mount Beauty, Bright, Corowa, Cobram, Yarrawonga, Wangaratta, Benalla, Mansfield, Shepparton, Murchison and Echuca; Corowa is just over the Murray in New South Wales.

The school is still developing a new Enhanced Primary Care Stream within the MD, for students who want to become GPs. It will include extra placements in general practice clinics, mentoring from GPs and primary care researchers, and new primary care electives. Students who enter through the North Western Pathway, a partnership with Victoria University that takes its first students in 2027, get priority access and are based at the Western Clinical School.

Before placements start, every student needs a Police Record Check and a Working with Children Check, and must meet immunisation requirements. The Department of Rural Health manages student housing in ten towns: the four clinical school towns plus Benalla, Mansfield, Bright, Mount Beauty, Myrtleford and Numurkah. Financial help is also offered for rural placements.

Discovery is the course's built-in choice, worth 87.5 credit points across the four years. In Years 1 and 2, each Discovery subject is either a Discovery topic, created by the school's clinicians for medical students only, or a Faculty Selective. Faculty Selectives come from other programs in the faculty, such as the Master of Public Health. In Year 3, Clinical Scholars choose from Discovery 3: Integration topics only. Before choosing, you meet one-on-one with a Course Advisor, an experienced academic, to match the options to your interests and goals.

The school's Discovery page lists recent topics, though options can change. Discovery 1 has included Disaster Medicine, Discover Cancer, Rural Health: Foundations and Foundations of Point of Care Ultrasound. Discovery 2 has included Becoming a Clinical Educator, Narrative Medicine, Cardiac Point of Care Ultrasound and On Country for Health, which explores First Nations health. Discovery 3: Integration has included Immersion in Robotic Surgery, Integrating Rural Health and Medical Humanities.

Faculty Selectives on offer include Biostatistics, Epidemiology 1, Health Economics 1, Bioethics in Practice, Planetary and Global Health, and Digital Transformation of Health. Some run as two-week intensive blocks, with live sessions you can join online or in person, followed by assessment. Completing one may count as credit towards another award, such as a public health degree.

Beyond Discovery, the handbook says you can take an elective placement outside your allocated clinical school to broaden your view of healthcare. Under the school's elective guidelines, last updated in August 2024, this is an optional placement of one to four weeks in the summer teaching break, never during teaching periods.

You arrange the elective yourself, in a rural area, interstate or overseas, and apply for the school's approval at least eight weeks ahead. Destinations where the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade advises reconsidering travel or not travelling (levels 3 and 4) are never approved. A pass is recorded once you submit an assessment report afterwards.

General practice electives are available in Years 2 and 4. In Year 2, the school's general practice department runs a Discovery option on how patients move between home, general practice and hospital, taught through placements. In Year 4, Clinical Scholars can preference general practice for their placements, in Melbourne or rural Victoria, including special-interest areas such as refugee, sexual or adolescent health.

Intercalating means combining the MD with a second degree, usually by pausing the MD for a period. At Melbourne it is optional, and you apply after you have been admitted. Three pathways are offered: a PhD, a Master of Public Health (MPH) or a Master of Biomedical Engineering.

The MD-PhD takes seven years, four of MD and three of PhD, and it is not accelerated. You start the PhD after passing Year 2, and you can be exempted, with credit, from the Discovery subjects in Years 3 and 4 to help you finish on time. In the third year of the PhD you plan your return with your clinical school, refreshing your clinical skills before rejoining Year 3.

You must meet the normal PhD entry requirements, usually an Honours or masters degree or equivalent experience, and meet the MD Course Director before applying. International student visa holders cannot take this pathway at present. MD-PhD students stay members of their clinical school and join the school's Research Training Academy, a community for intercalating students that offers mentoring, career guidance and research workshops.

The MD/MPH has up to 15 places a year for domestic students in good standing in Year 3. You complete three years of the MD, then take a year of MPH subjects while on leave from the MD. You return for the final year, giving your Discovery 4 project a public health focus. It takes five years, against at least six if done separately. You may be able to spend the first six months of the MPH year on exchange at McGill University or the University of Oslo.

The MD/Master of Biomedical Engineering is for students who completed the Biomedical Engineering Systems major; others may be considered but need an extra year. Your Discovery choices become engineering subjects, and after MD Year 1 you spend 12 months full time on the master's. In the final year, the first semester is an engineering capstone project, before you return for Transition to Practice. It takes five years and leads to recognition by both the Medical Board of Australia and Engineers Australia.

Parkville is the main teaching hub. When the AMC visited in 2022 it found refreshed tutorial rooms, hubs where students build their anatomical knowledge, and space to study on campus.

Several clinical schools have their own simulation facilities, where you practise on manikins and in mock clinical settings. Northern's students use a purpose-built simulation centre in the Northern Centre for Health Education and Research, shared with La Trobe University and Northern Health. It has two high-fidelity (highly realistic) laboratories for practising the care of very unwell patients, a simulated ward, a simulated consulting room and a clinical skills lab.

At St Vincent's, the Aikenhead Centre has a clinical simulation lab, 3D printing labs, seminar and tutorial rooms and a lecture theatre over two levels. At the Austin, the education precinct on level 4 of the Austin Tower holds the student common room, computer lab, lecture theatre and tutorial rooms. Its Clinical Skills Centre has manikins and models, including a fully computerised simulation manikin for practising emergencies.

At Shepparton, Clinical Education Facilitators, staff whose job is supporting students' learning, work in GV Health's medical, surgical and emergency departments, and small groups give chances for one-to-one time with clinicians. Shepparton students use a Clinical Skills Lab with high-fidelity simulation equipment, and Ballarat students use the one at Grampians Health.

The AMC found in 2022 that Shepparton had on-campus student housing, learning and recreation spaces, and an auditorium open to the community, with the local Yorta Yorta language used across the campus. There was no wet anatomy lab; instead students could use digital anatomy equipment at any time, backed by extra tutorials if needed.

Much day-to-day support comes from your clinical school. At Western, for example, the same clinical school staff support you across all three hospitals, and because students stay within one health network, senior students mentor those in earlier years. The Student Hub of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences also helps with placement checks, wellbeing, training and support.

MD students can get free support from Health and Wellbeing Practitioners, who are independent qualified practitioners. Rural Clinical School students have a rural-based practitioner, a psychologist or social worker, who offers free short- to medium-term support in person or by Zoom. Help can cover study pressure, isolation, relationships, mental health, and bullying or harassment. The university's counselling service is based at Parkville but offers phone sessions to rural students.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students can get free support from the school's Indigenous Primary Health Practitioner, who works with First Nations students across the faculty, in person in Melbourne or by Zoom. Murrup Barak, a university-wide team, also supports Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to succeed in their studies. The AMC asked the school to increase the resources of its First Nations Health unit and recorded that condition as satisfied in 2021.

Students with a disability or health condition can register with Student Equity and Disability Support for adjustments, such as alternative exam arrangements or an academic adjustment plan. The handbook notes that some adjustments possible on campus may not be reasonable at off-campus clinical sites. The University of Melbourne Medical Students' Society (UMMSS) runs networking, educational and social events.