The University of Otago Medicine course

In ELM the Medical Sciences, meaning anatomy, physiology, pathology, microbiology, biochemistry, pharmacology and behavioural science, are taught through lectures, labs and small-group tutorials. They are arranged in block modules around body systems. The 11 blocks have been Cardiovascular, Endocrine, Gastrointestinal, Musculoskeletal, Psychological Medicine, Respiratory, Nervous System, Renal, Metabolism and Nutrition, Reproduction, Development and Ageing, and Regional Clinical Anatomy.

Three programme modules run beside the science, taught mainly in tutorial groups of about ten: Clinical Skills, Integrated Cases and Early Professional Experience (EPE). Your tutors are teaching fellows and part-time tutors from the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences and the Dunedin School of Medicine. Vertical modules, such as professional development, ethics and evidence-based medicine, run across both years instead of sitting in one block.

About 60 per cent of your time in years 2 and 3 is formal teaching: lectures, labs, tutorials, supervised patient contact and community placements. The other 40 per cent is set aside for independent and peer learning, and small-group tutorials take up about 15 per cent of the whole.

ALM turns this around. In years 4 and 5 about three-quarters of your time is clinical, and what you learn follows the attachment you are on. The other quarter is lectures and tutorials, including vertical modules such as ethics, Hauora Māori, Pacific health, pathology and microbiology. By the TI year, small-group tutorials are the main formal teaching and most of your week is spent working in the team.

Anatomy is taught in Dunedin during ELM through lectures, labs and small-group tutorials, as part of the body-system blocks, one of which has been a Regional Clinical Anatomy block.

The bodies used in teaching come from the Department of Anatomy's bequest programme, which now receives more than 60 donated bodies and more than 100 new registrations a year. The first official bequest was recorded in 1943, and donation has been the only source of bodies since the late 1950s. Medical, dental, physiotherapy and science students all learn from them.

The W.D. Trotter Anatomy Museum, in the Lindo Ferguson Building on Great King Street, holds a large collection of specimens and models. The department has a hands-on policy: medical and other students handle the specimens and models freely and use the room as a classroom, while fragile historic pieces stay in glass cases.

Some of the models are made using CT and MRI scans, so handling them helps you make sense of those images. Semester opening hours for students are posted on the teaching platforms, including MedMoodle.

HSFY is a science year shared with future dentists, pharmacists, physiotherapists and medical laboratory scientists, so patient contact starts when you enter medicine in year 2.

In clinical skills tutorials you take histories and do limited examinations on classmates, actors and volunteer patients from the community, recruited through the Friends of the Medical School. Early Professional Experience places you in health-care settings around Dunedin to meet patients and see what doctors do.

Community Contact Week sends every student, in a small group, to a small town or suburb for several days. You work out how that community sees its own health needs and which services exist. Each of the three regions hosts about 100 students; Wellington's areas include Porirua, the Kapiti Coast, Whanganui, Palmerston North and the Wairarapa.

Year 4 is the first full clinical year. You join teams as a junior member, for example an acute medicine team at Dunedin or Timaru Hospital for four weeks. By the TI year you are responsible for named patients under a registrar, a senior doctor in specialist training, and the aim is that you leave able to practise safely as a first-year doctor.

Under the programme's 2026 Assessment Policies you are judged against set standards rather than against your classmates, and every internal assessment is meant to feed back into your learning. Professional conduct counts as much as marks when progress is decided, under the Code of Professional Conduct for Medical Students shared by the Universities of Auckland and Otago.

From year 4 each module reports a Summary of Achievement within ten working days of you finishing it: Pass, Pass After Conditions Met or Fail, with comments on strengths and areas to improve. A Conditional Pass is an interim result naming what you still need to show, and it becomes Pass After Conditions Met once you do. Student Progress Committees review results, and a Board of Censors grants Terms, meaning you have met the year's requirements.

Year 5 ends with the Whole Class Examination: two three-hour papers of 120 multiple-choice questions each, with one best answer and no marks lost for wrong answers. Both are sat on computers through Pātai Moodle, a separate installation of the school's MedMoodle system, on the same days in all three centres. Adult medicine and surgery take 90 to 100 of the 240 questions, and paediatrics, obstetrics and gynaecology, psychological medicine, pathology and public health take 20 to 25 each.

The pass mark is not a fixed percentage. It is set each year from the score of the student at the 90th percentile, and some questions are shared with other medical schools in Australia and New Zealand for comparison. If you fail you may sit a special examination between November and January, which you must pass before year 6, and you can normally repeat only one year of the degree.

The Prescribing Skills Assessment (PSA) is also sat at the end of year 5. It has 60 items in two hours, is produced by the British Pharmacological Society and adapted for Australia and New Zealand, and the New Zealand Formulary is open during the test. It covers writing and reviewing prescriptions, calculations, adverse drug reactions, drug monitoring and interpreting data. You must pass it, or a later sitting or oral examination, to graduate.

The AMC's December 2024 report records that the end-of-year-5 OSCE for the whole class was dropped, so clinical skills are now judged through workplace-based assessment within modules. Written exam time was also cut from nine to six hours. The school plans to replace the Whole Class Examination with progress testing, regular tests sat through the course, once that is feasible, so you may sit a different format.

• Distinction grades are being phased out between 2026 and 2028, so they will not exist for students entering now.
• In year 6, Terms requires passing every module, uploading at least six reflections to the MCNZ ePort online portfolio a month before the end, passing the PSA and a satisfactory elective report.
• Trainee interns must also complete at least seven Mini-CEX assessments of a physical examination to an acceptable standard, a requirement in place since 2021.
• You can apply in the first three weeks of the year to complete assessments in te reo Māori. The school finds a suitably skilled assessor or a translator, though multiple-choice papers are not changed.
• Written exams use te reo Māori terms without translation, from a Hauora Māori glossary that grows each year. In OSCEs you are expected to use the te reo you hear back in the consultation, or ask what it means and then use it.

Years 1 to 3 are in Dunedin. For years 4 to 6 your base is the campus you are allocated in year 3. Slightly under a third of the class stay in Dunedin, and the rest are split between Christchurch and Wellington. Each campus sits beside its main public hospital: Dunedin Hospital, Christchurch Hospital or Wellington Regional Hospital.

Public hospitals are run by Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand, the national health service that replaced the district health boards in July 2022. Its districts, such as Te Whatu Ora Southern and Te Whatu Ora Tairāwhiti, run the hospitals you are placed in. In Dunedin the Otago Clinical Skills Laboratories are a joint venture between the Faculty of Medicine and Te Whatu Ora Southern.

Each campus also uses smaller regional hospitals and general practices. Otago's list for the TI year is Invercargill or Timaru, Nelson, and Palmerston North or Hawke's Bay, and some trainee interns spend the whole year there apart from the elective. Christchurch's 2021–22 handbook also sent some paediatric runs to Timaru or Blenheim, and general practice placements to rural Canterbury, the West Coast and the Chatham Islands.

RMIP is the biggest move. Selected fifth-year students live in small groups in one of nine rural areas for the whole academic year, and up to 35 places were offered for 2027. The AMC recorded more rural immersion places from 2024. Students who entered through the New Zealand Rural Origins equity group may be required to take part, but nobody is bonded afterwards and the degree does not get longer.

During ALM you can also arrange a placement with an iwi health provider, a health service run by a Māori tribal organisation, through your campus Hauora Māori department.

Most of the course is prescribed, with no free paper choices. Your main decisions are your campus preference, whether to apply for RMIP and where to take your TI elective. Smaller choices are the optional eighth HSFY paper, the year 3 Humanities Selective and an optional Summer School paper.

The TI elective is one 12-week quarter of year 6, outside the prescribed course. You choose any medical, paramedical or medico-social work, meaning health-related social services, in New Zealand or overseas. Your TI supervisor must approve and sign off the placement before you leave, and past students' elective essays are kept in the library to help you choose.

The elective is usually taken somewhere new, often overseas; in 2018 about 70 per cent of students went abroad. Your host supervisor completes an assessment form, and Dunedin asks for an essay of at least 15 pages. Māori students can apply for international indigenous exchange electives in places where indigenous health is strong.

Intercalating at Otago means pausing the MB ChB after three or more completed years to take the Bachelor of Medical Science with Honours, BMedSc(Hons). It is a full-time year of research in a medical science field, written up as a thesis. Most students take it after year 3; a few take it after year 5, before the TI year.

In exceptional circumstances a BMedSc(Hons) student can upgrade to the intercalated MB ChB / PhD, taking further time out to complete a doctorate alongside the medical degree. Approval is case by case.

Shorter options are paid summer research studentships, including Health Research Council Pacific health scholarships for Pacific students, and double-degree combinations with a BA, BSc or BBiomedSc.

ELM is taught around the Health Sciences precinct at the south end of the Dunedin campus. The Hunter Centre on Great King Street is ELM's small-group base, shared with physiotherapy, dentistry and pharmacy students.

The Hunter Centre has small-group tutorial rooms set up for 12 and a clinical skills room fitted with examination beds and privacy screens for the ELM clinical skills programme. It also has two 30-seat seminar rooms that open into one, the Drennan Pathology Museum, study pods, a computer lab, students' association offices and an atrium with a café.

For years 4 to 6 in Dunedin, the Otago Clinical Skills Laboratories (OCSL) take up the second floor of the Fraser Building on Hanover Street. They host tutor-led clinical skills training for students and hospital staff, with room for 80 to 100 people across four areas. Dunedin's ambulatory medicine teaching uses a simulated outpatient clinic there.

Wellington's main medical school building closed because of earthquake risk, and reconfigured teaching spaces opened for the start of the 2024 academic year. Christchurch expects new research and teaching facilities by the end of 2026. On every campus the learning platform is MedMoodle, which holds module objectives and the Curriculum Map, the list of core conditions and presentations you are expected to know.

Associate Deans Academic Progress (ADAPs) keep an eye on your results. If a module gives you a Conditional Pass an ADAP may contact you, and after a second Conditional Pass or any Fail they meet you to go through it and offer support. Changes to assessment arrangements, such as extra time between OSCE stations, are approved through the ADAP and Disability Information and Support.

Māori students are supported by the Māori Health Workforce Development Unit and Kōhatu – Centre for Hauora Māori. Pacific students are supported by the POPO team and the Pacific Islands Research and Student Support Unit through Va'a o Tautai. Christchurch hosts the Māori/Indigenous Health Institute (MIHI) and Wellington the Eru Pōmare Māori Health Research Centre.

The AMC's 2024 report records a framework for student wellbeing, a leave policy for circumstances that affect your study, and a clear policy that bullying and discrimination are not tolerated. Each campus has a student care coordinator you can contact if you run into serious financial difficulty.