The Tasmania Medicine course

Everything you learn is grouped under four domains adapted from the AMC's outcomes for medical graduates: Clinical Practice, Professionalism and Leadership, Health and Society, and Science and Scholarship. Learning outcomes are written and assessed against these domains, so ethics, public health and research skills sit beside science and clinical skills in every year.

UTAS calls the curriculum learner-centred and built on situated learning: learning things in the setting where you will use them, which it says helps you engage and remember. Regular case-based learning (CBL) ties it together. In a CBL tutorial you work through a patient case, reason about what is happening and connect material from across the course.

In Years 1 and 2, much of the teaching comes as online modules you work through in your own time, and on campus you attend practicals, tutorials, workshops and keynotes. The AMC's 2022 report, from the MBBS years, records that UTAS introduced this blend of online lecture material, keynotes and small-group teaching on campus in 2022. Basic science is taught in parallel with clinical material, so the body system you are studying shapes the skills you practise.

From Year 3 the learning moves into clinical settings, where you work alongside other health professionals. Years 4 and 5 are run as integrated clinical placement years, with CBL sessions on core clinical problems that rely on your own self-directed study.

Each unit page sets out a weekly pattern of hours. In Years 1 and 2 a teaching week has about 10 hours of online modules, 10 hours of face-to-face practicals, tutorials, workshops and keynotes, and 18 hours of independent study. That is close to a full-time working week. In 2027, Semester 1 runs from 22 February to 13 June, after an orientation week from 15 February, and Semester 2 from 5 July to 24 October.

Years 3 to 5 run on a longer calendar of two half-year periods: in 2027, 25 January to 20 June and 21 June to 7 November. UTAS's 2022 course FAQ says this longer year is what lets a five-year course include a masters-level MD. A Year 3 teaching week has about 10 hours of classes, 15 hours of practicals, tutorials, workshops and keynotes, 5 hours of online modules and 8 of independent study. On a five-week clinical attachment, you spend 32 to 38 hours a week on placement.

In Years 4 and 5, a placement week is 32 to 38 hours. Year 4 also has group learning weeks, at the same hours and shared with project work. In Year 5 a two-hour CBL tutorial runs every week, and every six weeks there is a full week of block teaching made up of lectures, workshops and tutorials. Your project days are timetabled individually.

There is no stand-alone anatomy unit: anatomy is taught inside the body-system units. Year 1 covers how cells and tissues build the body, then the bones, joints, muscles, nerves and blood supply of the arms and legs. Year 3's first unit, CAM304, lists anatomy alongside neuroscience, endocrinology and pathology.

UTAS's Body Bequest Program provides donated bodies, used mainly to teach human anatomy to UTAS medical and allied health students. Donors' families are invited to a Ceremony of Appreciation, held every two years, where staff and students thank them. The AMC's 2022 report, written about the MBBS before the BMedScMD began, noted that the school had made its own audio-visual resources for the dissection sessions then taught and for online dissection lectures.

Clinical experience starts in Year 1 through professional experience placements, UTAS's term for learning in real workplaces. In Years 1 and 2 these are short placements and community visits, including rural health and family-focused programs.

In the Kids and Families Program you make four visits of about an hour each, at the family's home or by video call. You ask about the child's development, feeding and growth, family relationships, parenting, accidents, changes in behaviour, childcare and emotional support. Two of the visits fall in Semester 1 of Year 2.

Rural Week is part of Year 1's first unit, CAM101: its teaching includes rural week activities, and one of its assessments is the Rural Week Program. As recently as 2025, Year 2 also had a rural week of its own, a placement in a rural district during CAM202. In 2024 UTAS described more than 120 second-year students spending that week living and working in rural communities, with placements in general practices, regional hospitals, aged care homes, health hubs and pharmacies.

Your first full clinical attachments come in Year 3: three five-week placements in medicine and primary care, in hospitals and the community. You practise history taking, examination, diagnostic reasoning and basic procedures, and learn how investigations and simple management plans work. In 2025 the head of school said the new course places most of the first clinical year in the community, so that future doctors can manage complex patients outside hospital.

Each unit uses a mix of assessments, and a Professional Portfolio runs through every unit from Year 1 to Year 5. Each year's two units are assessed as a pair, with the weighting split across the year. The first unit carries 40% in Year 1, 48% in Year 2 and 30% in Year 3. In Years 3 to 5 the first-half unit gets an interim result until the year is complete.

In Year 1 you sit quizzes of multiple-choice and extended matching questions, which ask you to match cases to answers from a long list, plus two exam papers in each unit. Years 2 and 3 add in-semester tests and written papers, and Year 4 has a multiple-choice exam. Assignments cover the other strands, such as reflective writing on ethics, professionalism and leadership, health and society, evidence-based medicine and public health.

Clinical skills are assessed from Year 1. From Year 2 you sit OSCEs, Objective Structured Clinical Examinations, in which you rotate through timed stations that each test one task, such as taking a history or examining a patient. Each Year 2 unit has an OSCE, as do the second halves of Years 3, 4 and 5. Year 2 also includes oral presentations of CBL cases and an interview based on a pharmacology logbook.

Your project is assessed at each stage: the MD Project Plan in Year 3, a professional project assessment in Year 4, and an oral presentation and written report in Year 5. When the AMC reported in 2022, the plan was a progress report and reflective interview in Year 4 and a final report of 3,000 to 5,000 words. The second half of Year 5 also includes a portfolio interview.

Under the MBBS in 2022, the AMC reported that students in Years 4 and 5 used PebblePad, an online portfolio system, to collect clinical case logs and evidence of their clinical competencies.

Years 3 to 5 are based at one of three clinical schools. Each is linked to hospitals of the Tasmanian Health Service, the state's public health service, which UTAS names as its main teaching hospitals. Hobart uses the Royal Hobart Hospital and Launceston the Launceston General Hospital. The Rural Clinical School uses the North West Regional Hospital in Burnie and the Mersey Community Hospital in Latrobe. Each school also works with general practices and other local services.

The Dean of the Tasmanian School of Medicine allocates students to clinical schools under a Clinical School Allocation Procedure, and UTAS says you may be allocated to any of the three. Rural Training Stream students commit, when they accept their place, to all five years at the Cradle Coast campus and its training sites.

A Rural Clinical School is a clinical school supported by the Australian Government's Rural Health Multidisciplinary Training Program, which trains health professionals in rural and remote areas. UTAS's Rural Clinical School has taught students in the final years of the degree since 2002 and has campuses in Burnie and Latrobe. Its students also work in private general practices and aged care homes, and in their final years take rural placements in Smithton, Queenstown and on King Island, with accommodation at those sites.

A rural generalist is a doctor trained to provide primary care, emergency care and at least one area of specialist care in rural communities. Tasmanian students who register interest in the Tasmanian Department of Health's Rural Generalist Pathway can spend their final year at the Rural Clinical School or the Launceston Clinical School. They should do at least one final-year rotation in a rural general practice rated MM4 to MM7 on the Modified Monash Model, the national remoteness scale from MM1 (cities) to MM7 (very remote).

On placement you must be available five days and 40 hours a week, may be rostered on evening, night or weekend shifts, and may need to travel or relocate. Before your first placement you need a national police check, Working with Vulnerable People registration, proof of immunisation, a first aid certificate, a blood-borne virus declaration and a P2/N95 mask fit test. UTAS also registers you as a student with Ahpra.

For rural placements, UTAS's College of Health and Medicine provides free shared accommodation, subject to availability, in towns including Smithton, Queenstown, Scottsdale, St Helens and Huonville, and on King and Flinders Islands. You get your own bedroom and Wi-Fi, and one return airfare per placement to King or Flinders Island. Rural Clinical School students on Mersey Community Hospital rotations can use nearby furnished houses at no extra rent.

Elective placements, where you choose a clinical area that interests you, are part of the clinical years. In the 2027 unit pages, the elective sits inside the 15 weeks of clinical placement in the second half of Year 4 (CAM742).

The AMC's 2022 report, written while the MBBS was still running, gives examples of what was then on offer. A three-week public health elective, run with the Tasmanian Department of Health's Public Health Unit, took up to six senior students, who moved each week through four areas of public health practice. Year 4 students could also take mental health placements in private hospitals, clinics and psychiatrists' rooms, such as The Hobart Clinic.

Research is built into the MD through the Professional Practice Project. When the AMC reported in 2022, the school planned the time as half a day to a day a week, used flexibly over about 60 teaching weeks: nine weeks in all. Projects were to be grouped into streams, each overseen by a stream manager, and cancer centres near the Medical Science Precinct and at the North West Regional Hospital had offered to collaborate.

An Honours year is optional. After at least three years of full-time study, UTAS medical students can apply for the Bachelor of Medical Science with Honours (M4N). To take it, you need the Director of Medicine's approval for a formal leave of absence from the medical course.

M4N takes a minimum of one year, full or part time. Its four units, Medical Research 1 to 4, are built around a major project in a laboratory, community or clinical setting. You also analyse and present other current biomedical research. Before applying you agree a project with a supervisor and submit a Project Application Confirmation Form.

You can also do research alongside the course. A 2025 UTAS story describes a final-year MBBS student in Launceston who held a Clifford Craig Medical Student Research Scholarship. She studied how probiotics might affect social cognition in people with multiple sclerosis and presented the work at a neurology conference.

In Hobart the school is based at the Medical Science Precinct at 17 Liverpool Street in the city centre, rather than on the Sandy Bay campus. The precinct also houses the Menzies Institute for Medical Research and the Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre. The AMC's 2022 report, written under the MBBS, placed most teaching for Years 1 to 3 there.

The Hobart Clinical School is on Level 3 of F block inside the Royal Hobart Hospital, where it has been since 1960. It has teaching rooms, a student common room and study spaces, and the Albert G Baikie Clinical Library is on the ground floor.

Its simulation lab, refurbished with the hospital's advice and announced in May 2026, serves Years 3 to 5. It has a three-bed simulated ward and an ATLAS manikin that mimics airway, breathing and heart responses and gives real-time feedback on CPR. Staff run scenarios from behind a one-way mirror.

The Launceston Clinical School has been in the Launceston General Hospital's Northern Integrated Care Service building on Frankland Street since 2011, with space for CBL, simulation, small-group tutorials and online learning. Launceston's first-years study at the Inveresk campus precinct, about a 10-minute walk from the city centre.

The Cradle Coast campus at West Park in Burnie opened on the waterfront in 2021, with student accommodation on site. The Rural Clinical School's Burnie campus has lecture and tutorial rooms, consult rooms and a clinical skills area. Both its Burnie and Mersey campuses have Simulated Learning Environments with human patient simulators and part-task trainers.

The RA Rodda Museum of Pathology, at the clinical school site on Collins Street in Hobart, holds about 2,300 specimens of diseased organs and tissues. Around 1,200 are on display, each with a card giving the clinical details and the pathology. You learn general disease processes such as injury, inflammation and cancer, then how they affect each body system. It is a teaching collection, not open to the public.

Looking after yourself is part of the curriculum. Year 1 teaches self-care and reflective practice. The course's inherent requirements, the abilities every student must be able to show, include monitoring your own physical and mental health and seeking help when you need it.

As a UTAS student you can also use the university's general services. Counselling is confidential and available in person or online. Accessibility Advisers give guidance and support if you have a disability or a health condition, including a mental health condition. Study support includes Student Advisers, Peer Assisted Study Sessions and learning workshops, and the Riawunna Centre gives Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students academic and cultural support.

In 2022, under the MBBS, the AMC recorded two medicine-specific supports. A blended Mental Health First Aid course, training in how to help someone with a mental health problem, was compulsory for Year 1 students. A part-time academic with strong links to the local Aboriginal community had also joined, to develop Aboriginal health teaching and support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

Students can join Rustica, Tasmania's club in the National Rural Health Student Network. The Tasmanian University Medical Students' Society (TUMSS) is the students' own society, and the AMC's 2022 report names it as one route for student feedback to the school.