The UQ Medicine course

Science, clinical skills and professional practice are taught together, body system by body system, rather than in separate preclinical and clinical halves. Year 2 goes deeper into pathology and pathophysiology, the disease processes behind symptoms, and into clinical reasoning: moving from history and examination to a diagnosis and plan.

Year 1 sessions are held in person at your site or online, and most come with pre-reading such as videos, modules or quizzes. Your timetable places you in a small group of about 10 for team-based learning, history and examination tutorials and procedural skills workshops. Lectures, symposia and clinical plenaries are recorded to support attendance, not replace it.

From Year 3 you learn mainly as a member of clinical teams, in full-time 8-week placements that UQ calls immersions. UQ's curriculum page puts Year 4 at 20 per cent structured learning and 80 per cent clinical exposure in the first semester, then 10 and 90 per cent in the second.

The MD keeps its own calendar rather than UQ's standard semesters. In 2027, Year 1 starts on 1 February, Year 2 begins with an introductory week from 28 January, and Years 3 and 4 start on 4 January. The course is planned at about 40 hours a week: in Years 1 and 2, roughly 26 hours of scheduled sessions and 14 of guided self-study. The Year 1 figure comes from UQ's 2024 slides, which described four classroom days and one clinical day.

In Year 2, Greater Brisbane students spend Mondays at St Lucia or online and take small-group and clinical skills classes at their community's hospitals. Timetables allow 30 minutes' travel from St Lucia to the PA-Southside unit at the Princess Alexandra Hospital or the Mater, and 60 to Royal Brisbane or Greenslopes. For the Queen Elizabeth II (QEII) Hospital and The Prince Charles, they allow 90. Rural Clinical School students have a placement day each Tuesday and mostly face-to-face classes from Wednesday to Friday.

A Year 3 week has 34 hours in your learning community: about 30 in the workplace and 3.5 to 4 in immersion tutorials. Add three hours of whole-cohort learning (including a one-hour online tutorial on Thursdays) and three hours for your project and portfolio. Year 4 averages 28 to 30 hours on placement, plus the intern-preparation program, prescribing exam preparation and 6 to 8 hours of self-study.

Year 1 classes mostly run 8am to 6pm on weekdays. Clinical learning follows the team's hours, generally 6am to 6pm, with some evening, weekend and overnight shifts. You get at least 10 hours' break after an evening shift, and you are not expected at classes on the day a run of night shifts begins or ends.

In Brisbane, anatomy is taught in the Gross Anatomy Facility in the Otto Hirschfeld Building at St Lucia. The facility is run by the School of Biomedical Sciences and relies on the UQ Body Donor Program. It has two large climate-controlled laboratories and a teaching collection of prosections (specimens already dissected by staff) and skeletons.

Year 1 has a weekly anatomy tutorial on a different body region, with practical classes from week 1. The Medical School's guide for new students also mentions dissection classes later in the year, for which you supply disposable gowns.

Queensland's Transplantation and Anatomy Act 1979 requires respectful, orderly conduct around donated bodies, and phones and cameras stay at the bag racks. You wear a lab coat or gown, safety glasses, enclosed shoes, a surgical mask and your student ID. Online inductions must be done at least 72 hours before your first session.

Year 2 practicals combine gross, surface and imaging anatomy with histology, physiology and pathology. Brisbane students keep using the Gross Anatomy Facility, while students in Bundaberg and Rockhampton use plastinated human specimens (real tissue preserved with plastic), models and digital resources at CQUniversity's anatomy facilities.

Your first clinical contact is controlled. In Year 1 you practise histories and examinations on classmates and spend a day a week on simulation, small-group clinical coaching and hospital or community visits. You meet trained simulated patients in the Year 1 Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), a circuit of timed stations each testing one clinical task. Rural Clinical School students, and a small number of Brisbane students, also take part in a rural immersion to see life and healthcare in rural and remote communities.

Year 2 puts you in real clinical settings for up to two days a week, where your role is mainly to observe and, where appropriate, take part. You join bedside clinical coaching and general practice, outpatient and collaborative care placements, which can include community services, private practices and home visits. Some observed assessments now use real patients, such as a history taken in general practice.

From Year 3 you work in a clinical team on wards and in outpatient clinics, admission units, delivery suites and operating theatres. In Year 4, assessments should ideally be signed off by registrars (doctors in specialist training) or more senior doctors. In the final term, your intern-like work is checked and co-signed.

UQ uses programmatic assessment: many smaller assessments by different assessors across the year, pooled to decide if you are ready to progress. Each year, three components are judged separately (knowledge, clinical skills, and professionalism and leadership), and strength in one cannot make up for weakness in another. The Year 3 OSCE and the Year 4 PRINT term count as a fourth component. Standards come from expert judgement of competence, such as the Angoff method, not from ranking students, so every student can meet them. Each year's course is graded pass, fail or incomplete.

Knowledge is tested mainly through cumulative achievement tests (CATs): invigilated, computer-based multiple-choice exams spread through each year, each including some earlier material. Year 1 has a practice test and four scored tests, Year 2 four, Year 3 three, timed to your immersion order, and Year 4 two. Year 1 questions ask for the single best of five options, with no negative marking, and you receive feedback reports on your strengths and gaps.

Clinical skills are tested by OSCEs and in the workplace. Year 2 ends with a 10-station OSCE of history, examination and explanation stations, each with 2 minutes' reading and 8 minutes' performance. Year 3 ends with a 10-station whole-cohort OSCE. To pass it, you must meet the overall standard and the standard in at least 7 stations. A marginal fail leads to a supplementary OSCE in the same format.

Workplace assessment grows each year. Most Year 3 and 4 terms bring observed Mini-CEX, a Patient Focused Assessment and a clinical supervisor report. All 75 Clinical Skills Passport procedures must be completed at standard before PRINT. A portfolio of learning plans and reflections runs through every year.

If you marginally fail a component, you may be offered supplementary assessment, but not if you are judged not ready to progress. Supplementary assessment is capped at 32 units across the program. Failing a course brings a progression alert; a second failure requires an improvement plan; a third, or failing the same course twice, ends your enrolment. If you leave the program early, you can apply for a Graduate Diploma in Medical Studies after one year or a Master of Medical Studies after two.

UQ organises clinical teaching through three clinical schools, each a group of teaching hospitals and sites: Greater Brisbane, Rural and Ochsner. Your learning community is your home within them. Greater Brisbane students rank the four Brisbane communities in the second half of Year 1 and stay with the one allocated; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students receive priority.

Placements are mostly within your community, but Year 3 immersions use other sites when needed. In the 2027 Year 3 pathways, paediatrics is at the Queensland Children's Hospital in every Central pathway, most South pathways and many West ones. The Year 4 Clinical Extension is taken outside your community, and at least half of Greater Brisbane domestic students do it regionally, rurally or remotely, to meet Commonwealth requirements.

You pay your own travel and living costs on placement, but UQ-arranged rural terms come with free accommodation, from UQ units and Queensland Health staff quarters to shared houses and homestays. Most add a travel subsidy scaled by distance (from $65 to $670), a placement allowance of $50 a week and, where there is no Wi-Fi, $100 for internet. PRINT carries no subsidies.

The compulsory elective is the 8-week Personal Learning and Development term in Year 4, at any approved location worldwide. You can use it to explore a career interest, build clinical or research skills, work in an area of need or study overseas. You meet the costs. If you have no approved elective 4 weeks before the term, UQ allocates one in your learning community.

You can preference an elective offered by any UQ learning community, taken as a full 8 weeks, or arrange your own at least 12 weeks ahead. A self-arranged elective can be split between two providers and needs a student placement agreement. It can include up to 2 weeks of supervised work, such as a case report, or up to 4 weeks of supervised research. Places rated level 3 or 4 by Smartraveller are off limits.

Exchange partners each take a few UQ students. They are the Medical University of Graz, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Lille (B1-level French required), Jikei University, the University of Tübingen and Kobe University. Kobe electives are 6 weeks on site plus 2 weeks of remote supervised work. Several partners were full for 2027.

Optional electives are extra placements in your breaks, not assessed and not on your academic record. In Years 1 and 2 they must be observerships in Australia. In Years 3 and 4 they can be anywhere UQ's travel rules allow, within the 30-day (240-hour) yearly cap on unpaid work experience.

Intercalation at UQ means a research degree. The Clinician Researcher Track lets you interrupt the MD after Year 2 for full-time research, then return for Years 3 and 4. An intercalated MD-PhD adds three years, making seven in total, and an MD-MPhil, a research masters, adds one. BMedSc/MD students make the same move after the fourth year of their program.

You need the Medical School's approval before applying: satisfactory progress in the MD, a project and principal supervisor, and an interview with the Director of MD Student Research. UQ asks for an informal expression of interest before 1 May of Year 2. Incoming students can also ask to defer the MD to begin or finish a PhD or MPhil.

Research outside the curriculum counts as unpaid work experience. UQ's careers page also lists summer research scholarships and a Master of Public Health alongside the MD.

Year 1 in Brisbane is based in the MD Learning Hub on levels 4 and 5 of Building 69 at St Lucia. Its 14 tutorial rooms, most with an examination bed and clinical equipment, can be booked for group study. There is also a student area with a study lounge, computers, 24-hour lockers, a kitchenette and a seminar room, open 6am to 11pm on weekdays. Doctor's kits are available to borrow.

Over 100 casual tutors teach Year 1 and 2 small groups at the Hub, Royal Brisbane, PA-Southside and the Mater. Teaching also uses the Clinical Skills Development Centre on the Royal Brisbane campus and Greenslopes' Francis Baron Burnett Simulation Centre, with its simulated emergency bays, operating theatres and wards.

Rockhampton, Bundaberg and Hervey Bay each have a clinical simulation lab, task trainers and a mock ward, and Toowoomba a clinical skills laboratory and simulation facilities. Brisbane hospital units have their own spaces too, such as tutorial rooms and a student common area at Redland Hospital and 24-hour library access at Ipswich.

For academic problems your learning community is the first contact. Academic Guidance Leads for each year and region take on harder cases with a stepped-care approach, which can include helping you write a learning plan. If you miss more than 10 per cent of a learning block, your tutor or supervisor tells your learning community, which checks in and arranges any make-up time.

The Medical School Student Support Team handles pastoral, health, disability, financial and international concerns. It sits within UQ Student Services, is confidential and plays no part in progression decisions. Principal advisers cover named learning communities and rural units. Appointments can be in person, by phone or on Zoom, and UQ-Ochsner students in New Orleans get extended hours.

Every new student is invited into the Personal Advisor Network, which pairs you with an academic, clinician or researcher, ideally for the whole course. You meet about three times a year to talk about progress, wellbeing and life as a medical student. Your Year 1 advisor comes from your own learning community. A Personal Advisor Rural Network supports students interested in rural careers.