The Monash Medicine course

Monash calls its curriculum integrated: units are taught by staff from across the faculty, and each block of the campus years combines basic science, patient-based presentations and small-group discussion around one body system. The school describes the doctor-patient interaction as the core that binds each year.

The small-group case format is Integrated Case Learning (ICL), which the AMC's 2023 report describes as Monash's adaptation of problem-based learning (PBL). A group works through a patient case, decides what it needs to learn and reports back, alongside taught sessions rather than instead of them. Most basic science is delivered in active workshops, with lecture content provided online in short chunks, and every few weeks a concept and consolidation session (formerly a digilab) pulls the recent science from all disciplines together.

The campus years are timetabled heavily. For each of the two year-long units the handbook expects about 12 to 14 hours of teacher-directed study plus 10 to 12 hours of your own, 24 hours a week per unit. Attendance at tutorials, practicals and simulation classes is compulsory, because the school treats them as preparation for placements. Persistent absence can cost you access to placements and, with it, the course.

From Year 3B the teaching follows your rotation, with each specialty attachment bringing its own lectures, tutorials, case-based learning, bedside tutorials and practical skills sessions. Lecture delivery varies between sites, some clinical schools keeping recorded online content and others teaching face to face, and pathology is taught online to the whole cohort. Back to Base sessions bring the dispersed Year 3B and 5D cohorts together for shared teaching on the core curriculum.

Two strands run across the years. Interprofessional learning puts you alongside pharmacy, midwifery, nursing, nutrition and dietetics and radiation science students. The Indigenous health curriculum is developed with the faculty's Gukwonderuk Unit: two ICL tutorials carry Indigenous health outcomes, faculty-wide modules are delivered in Year 3B, and every unit's outcomes include culturally safe care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients.

In year 1 you take two year-long units at once. Introduction to medical practice budgets 12 hours a week of teacher-directed study, about five hours of workshops and seven hours of seminars, practical assessment sessions and lectures, plus 12 hours of your own. Principles of medicine 1 adds eight hours of tutorials and four hours of applied sessions and practicals, again with 12 hours of self-directed work.

Year 2 follows the same pattern. Foundations of medical practice lists 12 hours a week of tutorials, workshops, practical sessions, site visits, integrated case-based tutorials and online lectures. Principles of medicine 2 lists 14 hours: six hours of lectures and two two-hour tutorials, with 10 hours of online and self-directed study on top.

Year A in Churchill budgets 12 hours of teacher-directed time plus 12 hours of self-study for each of its two units. Clinical placements run fortnightly, and each semester half the cohort also attends a non-clinical community placement. Year M students in Mildura have one non-contact day a week, with the rest of the week live, either online or face to face.

In the clinical years the week is the working week of your placement: around 40 hours at the clinical site, including ward rounds, clinics and case meetings, with seminars, tutorials and online modules fitted around it. School of Clinical Sciences students spend Tuesday afternoons back at Monash Medical Centre for an academic program. During the six-week Scholarly Intensive Placement there are no other classes, and the handbook expects 48 hours a week of supervised work and private study.

Anatomy is taught inside the systems blocks of the campus years rather than as a stand-alone subject, so the anatomy of a system is learnt in the same block as its physiology and its diseases. Teaching sits with the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at Clayton, whose Centre for Human Anatomy Education (CHAE) oversees anatomy education across the university.

The AMC's 2023 report says anatomy tutorials and dissection are delivered in small groups in the dissection facility. Gross anatomy, histology and basic radiology are taught using mixed methods that include virtual reality. Direct entry students also have access to a large collection of prosected specimens: real human specimens already dissected by staff so that the structures are laid out for study.

Graduate entry students spend Year A in Churchill but come to Clayton for their histology and gross anatomy classes, and the AMC report notes that they travel there to experience some dissection. The same report states that performance in anatomy assessments is equivalent across all of the school's sites.

Your first contact with the health system comes through four half-day clinical site visits in year 1, two each semester, to hospitals, medical practices and community care services. Alongside them, clinical skills tutorials start with communication, handwashing and sharps disposal, then subcutaneous and intramuscular injections, and you take histories and examine simulated patients.

In years 1 and 2 you also join the Community Based Practice program and learning activities in Indigenous health. In year 2 the Rural Health Education Program gives you a one-week rural placement, in April or August, in one of six communities: Bairnsdale, Bendigo, Mildura, Sale, Traralgon and Warragul. In Bendigo, for example, you shadow a GP and tour Bendigo Health. Monash Rural Health arranges and pays for your accommodation, in cabins, holiday apartments or motels depending on the town.

Year A students start earlier and more often. Clinical placements begin early in semester 1 and run fortnightly at one of six hospitals in and around Gippsland. Five are in the region, Wonthaggi Hospital, Central Gippsland Health in Sale, Leongatha Hospital, Latrobe Regional Health in Traralgon and West Gippsland Healthcare Group in Warragul, and the sixth is St John of God Hospital in Berwick, on Melbourne's south-eastern edge. Each semester half the cohort also completes a non-clinical placement with a community organisation in Gippsland, working alongside multidisciplinary teams and their clients.

Monash assesses the whole course on a pass-grade-only basis. Every unit is a set of hurdle tasks, each marked pass or fail, and failing a hurdle can mean failing the unit. A weighted average mark is kept behind the scenes and can be used for scholarships and prizes, but it does not appear on your transcript. Supplementary assessment, a second exam offered after a fail, is not available in the medicine units. Instead, each hurdle comes with a set number of attempts, listed below.

One hurdle appears in every unit from year 1 to 5D: Clinical Learning Engagement Activity Recognition, or CLEAR. It requires you to take part in at least 80 per cent of the unit's learning activities, as defined in each year's progression guidelines, by the end of second semester. If you fall short, you get one further chance to make it up.

End-of-year written papers are on-campus eExams of 100 questions in three hours and ten minutes, sat in early to mid-November. In 2026 Year 1 sits its second-semester papers on 2 and 5 November, and year 2, Year A and Year M sit theirs on 10, 12 and 16 November. Year 3B sits a 100-question paper on 10 November and an 80-question paper the next day, plus four online pathology exams of 25 questions each. Year 4C sits its papers on 2 and 3 November.

Final year ends in Back to Base week at Clayton in late October. In 2026 you sit the Safe Practice Assessment (Written) on Monday 26 October: a 100-question on-campus eExam of three hours and ten minutes. The next day you sit the Prescribing Skills Assessment, a 60-question online prescribing exam of two hours run through the British Pharmacological Society's platform. The handbook lists it at three hours and ten minutes, but the 2026 timetable gives two hours. If you do not pass the prescribing exam at the first sitting, you must complete an online written prescribing assignment before you can graduate.

Clinical skills are examined through the Assessment for Progression Examination (APEx): a face-to-face assessment you can sit up to four times, with feedback between attempts. The AMC's 2023 report records that it replaced the end-of-year OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination, a circuit of timed stations) in most years from 2023. In 2026 the second and third APEx for Years 2, A and M fall in October and early November. Year 3B sits APEx 1 from late August and APEx 2 and 3 at its clinical school in September or October. Year 4C sits APEx inside its rotations and an APEx H+ in early November, and 5D has its own.

Much clinical assessment happens at the bedside through observed clinical encounters (OCEs): a consultation watched and graded by a clinician. They begin in year 1 as numbered encounters at Clayton and move to real patients in the clinical years. You complete two in 3B, and several in 4C, including a GP prescribing task, a GP clinical reasoning task and a neonatal examination. In 5D you sit three 40-minute OCEs with real patients on the emergency, surgery and medicine rotations, and must pass two of them.

• How many attempts you get depends on the hurdle. Most written exams and assignments allow one more attempt after a fail. The Year A and Year M written exams are stricter: only a borderline fail, a result just below the pass mark, earns a further attempt, and a clear fail gets none.
• The assignment portfolios of years 1, 2 and A allow three attempts. Clinical skills exams and each APEx allow up to four, and each final-year OCE allows two.
• The Scholarly Intensive Placement is marked differently. Its report counts for 60 per cent of the unit grade, the online modules 10 per cent and the executive summary 30 per cent, split equally between an oral presentation and a written reflection of up to 250 words. The AMC's 2023 report describes pass-grade-only assessment as adopted across the course.
• Professional behaviour is a hurdle in every unit through the Professional Standards, Ethical Behaviour and Student Support (ProFESS) framework. Failing it means repeating the unit, and serious or repeated concerns go to a Faculty Fitness to Practice panel, which can exclude a student. The AMC's 2023 report notes a small number have been held back or excluded this way.
• Results are released in mid-November for 5D (16 November in 2026) and in early December for years 1 to 4C (3 December 2026). Deferred and additional written papers run on 4 to 6 January 2027, and last attempts at APEx and observed clinical encounters fall between 4 and 14 January.

For the three clinical years you are attached to one of four clinical schools: the School of Clinical Sciences at Monash Health, the School of Translational Medicine, Eastern Health Clinical School and the School of Rural Health. Year 3B and Year 5D are each spent at one home clinical school, while Year 4C moves you around to reach four specialties and community general practice. Since 1 January 2026 Alfred Health, Peninsula Health, Bass Coast Health and Gippsland Southern Health Service have been one organisation, Bayside Health, though every hospital keeps its name and Monash's pages still use both sets of names.

Placements are allocated the year before each clinical year through a two-phase process in InPlace, the university's placement system. Phase 1 ranks your preferred school or cohort and Phase 2, for School of Rural Health students, ranks specific sites, weighing your preferences, approved special requirements, recorded home address and the places available. Miss the deadline and you are allocated at random, and every allocation is provisional until results are released, so the school warns you not to sign a lease until placements are published.

Accepting a place in the course means accepting your placement allocation, and the school tells applicants to expect both metropolitan and rural placements. Students in Commonwealth Supported Places, the government-subsidised places, must do at least four weeks in a rural area under the federal Rural Clinical Training and Support requirements. A proportion must also spend a semester of Year 5D at the School of Rural Health if they have not been rural before. Rural-background students can ask for their home region, and Dean's Rural List students may get preference, though nothing is guaranteed.

You are responsible for your own travel and accommodation. The school recommends reliable transport, a car is advised at rural sites, and students on late-night rosters are always paired. In the regions, Monash Rural Health provides subsidised accommodation at $130 a week in 2026 and $140 in 2027: college-style dormitories for Year 3B and furnished shared houses near your site, with a two-week minimum stay. Emergency grants, low-interest loans and a Monash Rural Health Financial Assistance Fund exist for students under financial pressure.

Two rural cohorts commit to the regions from the start. Extended Rural Cohort students (Direct Entry, 30 places) spend years 1 and 2 at Clayton, then sign a Statement of Understanding to complete five clinical semesters, all of 3B and 4C and half of 5D, in Gippsland or north-west Victoria. They sit the same exams and carry no return-of-service obligation. End-to-End Rural Cohort students (Graduate Entry, 30 North West places and five Gippsland places from 2027) do Year A at Churchill and then follow the same pattern. Both cohorts preference their 3B and 4C sites as a locked two-year block.

The Monash Mildura Primary Care Training Pathway is smaller still: 10 Graduate Entry places for local applicants who complete the entire degree in Mildura through the Monash Mildura General Practice Academy. Its pre-clinical year, Year M, has its own calendar (8 February to 4 June and 5 July to 22 October in 2027) and blends face-to-face and online teaching at regular, predictable hours, with local clinical and community placements. The second year places you at Mildura Base Public Hospital, Mildura Health Private Hospital, general practices, Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations and community health services, and the later years follow the usual pattern locally. Shared accommodation costs $130 a week.

Choice comes mainly in final year. One of the six 6-week rotations of Year 5D is a specialty rotation you select, and what is on offer depends on your home base. Bendigo lists anaesthetics, clinical education and simulation teaching, intensive care, oncology, orthopaedics, paediatrics, palliative care, renal medicine and urology. Mildura lists anaesthetics, cardiology, general practice, orthopaedics, medical education and Indigenous health, the last spent at Coomealla Health Aboriginal Corporation or Mallee District Aboriginal Services. The Department of General Practice also runs a GP option you can opt into outside your home base.

The Scholarly Intensive Placement is the other chosen block. You preference a host school alongside your other 5D rotations: the School of Translational Medicine, Eastern Health Clinical School, the School of Rural Health, the School of Clinical Sciences at Monash Health or the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine. Topic lists appear two to six weeks before the rotation and are ranked, claimed or allocated depending on the school. You cannot find your own supervisor, and group projects are allowed if each student is assessed separately.

Overseas options are specific rather than open-ended. In semester 1 of Year 4C you can apply through Monash Abroad to take the Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Children's Health rotations at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. In Year 5D, away rotations are allowed only in rotations 3, 4 and 5 and for at most two rotation periods, for an overseas exchange in the specialty rotation or for Canadian and United States permanent residents who must train at home for registration.

The clinical sites page lists short-term overseas opportunities with the Karolinska Institute, Charite in Berlin, King's College London, the National University of Singapore and Osaka University. The Scholarly Intensive Placement cannot be taken overseas except by students returning to an overseas Honours supervisor, or by Canadian students who must be in Canada for their medical exams and are then supervised remotely from Monash.

The Bachelor of Medical Science (Honours), written BMedSc(Hons), is an optional one-year intercalated research degree. Intercalating means pausing the medical course, which Monash calls taking intermission, to spend a full year on a research project with a Monash supervisor before returning to complete the MD. You can apply after completing the first three or four years of the course, and the school says it is now the only way to earn Honours in medicine.

There are overseas Honours opportunities, and the school's November 2025 conference brought together 51 medical students who had intercalated that year. High-achieving Honours students can continue into an accelerated PhD through the Monash MD-PhD pathway. A different route is the MD/MPH: you take a one-year Master of Public Health between Year 4C and Year 5D, so the whole program takes six years. Entry is competitive on your results to the end of third year, and applications close in June of Year 4C (22 June in 2026).

The school is candid that the six-week Scholarly Intensive Placement cannot replace a research year: most placements are small contributions to larger projects, and few produce a publication. Students aiming to be clinician-researchers are steered to BMedSc(Hons), which qualifies you for PhD entry where the MD alone does not, and Honours students can return to their Honours supervisor for the placement.

Practically, you flag a planned Honours year or other 12-month leave in InPlace so that no clinical placement is arranged, and you can change that choice without penalty until March of the following year. Intermission itself is applied for through the Web Enrolment System during the October to November re-enrolment period.

At Clayton, anatomy and histology teaching happens in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, which houses the Centre for Human Anatomy Education, the dissection facility, a full-service histology laboratory and a 3D printer used for anatomical models.

The Victorian Heart Hospital is the newest teaching site and sits within the School of Clinical Sciences; the AMC's 2023 report calls its learning suite the most significant new infrastructure for the medical school.

Monash Rural Health Churchill occupies Building 3W on Federation University's Gippsland campus, with library services and a clinical skills simulation environment. Monash Rural Health Bendigo sits beside the 724-bed Bendigo Health, with a simulation centre, tutorial rooms, an auditorium, a medical library and student accommodation. Monash Rural Health Mildura is next door to Mildura Base Public Hospital, which has more than 170 beds, and across the road from Mildura Health Private Hospital. It has student accommodation, a medical library and a two-laboratory simulation centre, one laboratory set up as an intensive care and emergency bay and the other as a birthing suite.

The school runs a simulated patient program with separate registries for Clayton and Gippsland; the volunteers take part in teaching sessions and in end-of-year exams coordinated across several campuses at once. Teaching materials, unit guides and the required online modules live in Moodle, the university's learning platform.

One caveat from the AMC's 2023 report: it flagged a pressing need for dedicated teaching space at the largest clinical school network, a project delayed indefinitely by spending caps from 2021.

The school has student support staff and a clinical lead dedicated to the clinical years, alongside their pre-clinical equivalents, and an international student support lead. Each School of Rural Health clinical school has student advisors linked into the clinical-years support team. Each clinical school and site also has a Student Wellbeing Liaison Officer who can arrange practical help, including with money pressures on placement.

ProFESS is built to support as well as to judge. Its first two quadrants, support and then review and remediation, are managed by academics while your studies continue and do not affect progression; only serious or persistent concerns move to a Fitness to Practice panel.

Monash Rural Health's Year A page describes a peer-mentoring scheme at Churchill, written for the 2023 intake. New Year A students were placed in small mentee groups, mentored by Year 3B students who had recently done Year A themselves. The faculty also runs peer mentoring more widely, and its student health and wellbeing pages collect stress-management advice, guidance on unplanned leave and emergency contacts.

Wellbeing is also taught: the pre-clinical Health Enhancement Program and mindfulness sessions, and a Compassion Training course for final-year students introduced in 2023 to help with self-regulation and burnout. Indigenous students have scholarships and living support, and three Indigenous medical graduates have been appointed as teaching associates to support them.