The Western Sydney Medicine course

Years 1 and 2 each run as a single 80-credit-point subject over two terms, called Clinical Sciences 1 and Clinical Sciences 2. Both are built on authentic clinical scenarios that tie the biomedical sciences to real patients. The main vehicle is small-group problem-based learning, supported by lectures, tutorials and practicals, and the teaching covers each body system in turn.

Alongside the systems you study the human context of health and disease, medical professionalism, the quality and safety of healthcare, evidence-based practice and research. These are taught through community visits, hospital-based sessions and workshops. Four themes run through all five years, and every subject's learning outcomes map to them: Patient Care, Health in the Community, Personal and Professional Development, and Scientific Basis of Medicine.

From Year 3 the balance flips. You learn mainly on clinical and community placements, backed by theory modules such as Evidence-based Medicine and Research Skills, Professional and Personal Development, and Scientific Streams. Conference weeks are teaching weeks set within the placement years: there are three in Year 3, and Year 5 has one 40-hour week of lectures.

The AMC's 2021 accreditation report, written when WSU planned to run the course jointly with Charles Sturt University, described how your responsibility grows. In Year 3 students joined the team on medicine and surgery rotations, helping with patient care and writing admission notes in the patient record. Year 5 was treated as a pre-internship year, and the current handbook still ends the course with a Pre-Internship learning program.

Research training leads to the MD Project, a supervised project of your own. It can be a research study, an education project, or a service-learning project, where you work with a health or community service on the needs of the service or its clients. The school expects work of the standard of a professional masters degree. The research skills behind it are first taught in the Population Health strand of Years 1 and 2, and you are trained in writing reports, giving talks and making conference posters.

Since 2025 the project has had its own 9-week attachment in Year 4, and you plan it in Year 3. In April and May you approach supervisors in your area of interest, and your proposal is due by the end of June. Students without their own project are allocated one that a supervisor has offered, by October. Classmates can share a larger project, but each needs their own question. If you are on the rural placement in Bathurst or Lismore, your project must be based there.

WSU says clinical learning begins in your first weeks, working with and learning from real patients. In Year 1 this means bedside teaching with patients, community visits and hospital-based sessions alongside your PBL group. In 2021 the AMC described Years 1 and 2 as campus learning plus one day a week of clinical tutorials at a clinical school. Two Year 1 assessment tasks assess how you perform on placement, so this contact is a formal part of the year.

The 2021 AMC report listed the settings WSU used for teaching: Aboriginal Medical Services, general practices, hospitals, community agencies and schools. It also noted that in Years 1 and 2, PBL, personal and professional development and procedural skills sessions were led by professionals from several health disciplines.

Year 2 adds procedural skills and two assessed placements, one of them in general practice. You also sit your first OSCE, an Objective Structured Clinical Examination, where you rotate round timed stations that each test one clinical task, such as examining a patient or explaining a diagnosis.

Year 3 is the first full-time clinical year, with a minimum of 1,050 hours of clinical practice. You rotate through medical and surgical teams, the emergency, intensive care and anaesthetics departments, and community services, applying what you learned in the first two years.

Each year's subject is ungraded, so your result is satisfactory or unsatisfactory rather than a mark, and every task listed in the 2027 handbook is a hurdle. A hurdle is a task you must pass to pass the subject, however well you do on the others. Some tasks, such as those in the MD Project, are rated on a four-level scale from above satisfactory to not yet satisfactory, where the top three levels are passes.

Written exams run through the course. Years 1 and 2 each have written papers A to D, Year 3 has a final exam, and final year has separate short-answer and multiple-choice exams. The 2021 AMC report listed the written formats as multiple-choice questions (MCQs), short-answer questions (SAQs) and modified essay questions (MEQs), where a case unfolds over a series of questions.

Clinical skills are tested in several formats. Year 1 has practical exams, Year 2 has its OSCE, and Year 3 has a clinical skills examination and a long case. In a long case you spend time with one patient, taking a full history and examining them, then present your findings to examiners. Year 5 adds a case-based discussion and a summative long case, both oral exams, and the final subject lists further clinical examinations.

On placement, your performance on each attachment is assessed, and professionalism and attendance are assessed every year. Attendance is compulsory, and failing to attend results in a Compulsory Fail (CF) for the subject. Because each year is a single subject and the prerequisite for the next, you have to meet the standard on every task to move up a year. You also cannot attend hospital teaching or placements until your documents have been verified through NSW ClinConnect, as NSW Health requires.

Your portfolio is assessed every year, with interviews in Year 2 and a Portfolio Interview in final year. In 2021 the AMC also noted formal 360-degree feedback during the five-week Indigenous health rotation, meaning feedback gathered from many of the people you work with, used as a summative assessment in Year 5.

The MD Project has four tasks of its own in Year 4. First comes a learning plan with a 750-word literature review, due at the end of Research Skills Week. Your supervisor then assesses how you worked during the attachment. In week 9 you give a six-slide talk, 4 minutes plus 3 minutes of questions, at a compulsory in-person Presentation Day, and hand in a 300-word abstract and a 700-word discussion.

All your placements are compulsory and unpaid, and the AMC's accreditation standards require a minimum number of clinical placement hours. The handbook sets minimum hours for each clinical year: 1,050 hours of clinical practice in Year 3, then 1,225 hours of professional practice in Year 4. The two halves of Year 5 add 700 and 525 hours. That comes to about 3,500 hours in all, depending on placement availability.

Your main teaching hospitals are Campbelltown, Blacktown and Mount Druitt, but you may be sent to other Sydney hospitals from Year 1. Macarthur Clinical School at Campbelltown Hospital was WSU's first clinical school, and Blacktown/Mt Druitt Clinical School its second. Year 3 rotations also use Bankstown, Fairfield and Liverpool hospitals and community organisations. Bankstown-Lidcombe and Liverpool take students in medicine and surgery, and Fairfield hosts obstetrics and gynaecology attachments.

A shuttle bus links the Campbelltown campus with the hospitals in Campbelltown. For other sites you need a car, public transport or car-pooling, and the handbook says you pay your own travel, accommodation and living costs on placement in Years 3 to 5. The school allocates students to hospitals for each rotation. It takes special circumstances into account, but it may not give you your first preference.

WSU's rural clinical schools are in Bathurst, about 200 km inland from Sydney, and Lismore, in the Northern Rivers region. The rural placement starts in Year 4 and runs continuously for at least 12 months, and you follow the same curriculum as your classmates in Sydney. You apply for a place, and subsidised accommodation is available. If too few students volunteer, the school allocates students until the rural places are filled.

At Bathurst, every student does a term in rural general practice at one of nine local practices in Bathurst, Oberon and Blayney, and a term in Indigenous health at the Orange Aboriginal Health Service. Hospital rotations may include surgery, medicine, paediatrics, oncology, mental health and critical care, depending on what you completed before your rural term. At Lismore, the 12 months are based at Lismore Hospital, with time in general practices, community health services and Aboriginal Medical Services across the Northern Rivers.

Rural time is not limited to the rural clinical schools. The school warns that some students may do several rotations at other rural hospitals in NSW, and final-year attachments can be anywhere in rural and remote NSW. The Year 5 Aboriginal health placement usually takes you away too. There are only two Aboriginal Medical Services in Greater Western Sydney, so the school has placements across NSW, one in Sydney and most in rural and remote areas.

Intercalating means pausing your medical degree to complete a separate research degree, then returning. At WSU the option is the Bachelor of Medical Research, and it is optional. You take a leave of absence from the MD after passing Years 1 and 2, spend 12 months full time or 24 months part time on research, then return to Year 3.

Years 1 and 2 of the Bachelor of Medical Research are identical to Years 1 and 2 of the MD, so the research year completes the degree. WSU's Bachelor of Medical Research page asks for at least 160 credit points of the MD, the first two years, with a grade point average (GPA) of 5, a credit average. The part-time option is not open to international students on a student visa.

The school expects you to return to medicine afterwards, but the Bachelor of Medical Research can also be an exit point if you decide not to continue with the MD. It has its own compliance requirements, including a Working with Children Check and a first aid certificate with CPR, updated each year.

The School of Medicine is in Building 30 on the Campbelltown campus, the home base for WSU's medical students and the school's staff and researchers. The four-storey facility has an anatomy laboratory, a computer laboratory, a clinical skills laboratory, a large multi-purpose practical space, problem-based learning tutorial rooms and eight research laboratories. Its four buildings are linked by a central hub with a covered outdoor space.

The course page also lists simulation laboratories and a neuroscience behavioural investigation laboratory among the facilities medical students can use.

Macarthur Clinical School, next to Campbelltown Hospital, has a simulation laboratory for practical skills, eight tutorial rooms, a seminar room and a library. The Blacktown/Mt Druitt Clinical School and Research Centre has a clinical skills lab where you practise resuscitation, venepuncture (taking blood) and cannulation on simulation manikins before doing them on the ward. It also has tutorial rooms, an auditorium and the hospital library.

At Bathurst, rural students live in the Ben and Elizabeth Chifley cottages in Howick Street, two furnished six-bedroom houses opposite the hospital, at a subsidised rate. Lismore has newly built student accommodation near Lismore Hospital.

The school's Medical Education Unit coordinates and teaches parts of the course, and also provides student support and pastoral care in all five years. Through the portfolio, Professional Advisors help you identify your learning and professional development needs and plan how to meet them.

In 2021 the AMC described a student support flowchart showing who to contact for counselling, health and academic advice. Year Academic Coordinators ran orientation sessions at the start of each semester or clinical year. It also described an online curriculum roadmap, built for WSU, that links each learning objective to the activity where it is taught.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students can use the Badanami Centre for Indigenous Education, which has seven centres across WSU campuses. The Bathurst rural clinical school has its own student coordinator and a rural student support officer.

You can also join the Rural Undergraduate Pathway (RuralUP), a School of Medicine program for rural experience. Its main feature is a series of interprofessional simulation workshops in a rural setting, where you work through realistic patient scenarios with students from other health professions. The school also supports rural electives and extra rural work experience outside the course, for example with contacts, proof of insurance and travel advice.

Student groups include the Rural Health Union of Western Sydney (RHUWS), a multidisciplinary student group for rural health. The 2021 AMC report also described the Western Sydney Medical Society, the medical student society, with surgical, physician and global health groups.