JCU JCU Medicine: The Unofficial JCU Med Bible (Vol. 2)

[munna_mbbs]

Hi!
I have been accepted into MBBS for 2023 at JCU Townsville... and was wondering if someone might have some insight on different residential halls? or if there are any forums or blogs I could read?
Ideally, I would want to go to a hall with not too much party culture and not too much of an academic incline.
Any info will be super helpful
Cheers!

Hey! When did you apply for this?

 

[StevenStrange]

I believe in the recent budget it included a proposal for 80 CSP but it may only go through is the current government is re-elected? Has anyone else seen this. I’ll try have another look for it.

2022 Update - JCU looks to Expand to Mackay and Cairns with ~80 Additional Medical Student Places

Some interesting news for you all! I was chatting to a trusted senior academic as part of the CMD recently and they disclosed to a few of us students in an informal meeting that JCU has been given another ~80-100 total medical places funded by the federal government, with around half of those new places being linked to a new Mackay clinical school from years 1-6 and the other half to start in Cairns from years 1-3. I asked if this was "approved" or simply "planned" and they said the federal government had signed off on the "preliminary funding" a few months ago following JCU’s successful re-accreditation with the AMC last year, and that JCU was now in the process of getting building permit approval to build the new clinical skill in Mackay (Cairns already has a medical school). My source said that this new increase in student intake was planned for 2023, but due to COVID-19 I suspect it might be pushed back slightly. I expect we'll receive more news about this directly from JCU soon, but thought I'd give you all a heads up directly from the source! I wouldn’t be posting this if I was under any NDA, nor did the academic say this was said in confidence (in fact they said it had already been circulated within JCU and I was free to tell anyone), but as I don’t have anything tangible to back this up other than their word (I can't see any mention of this being actually approved online), I will say this is still “speculative” if anyone asks. I did a bit of digging online here and here and it looks like JCU has been lobbying the federal government for this for the past year with a few submissions to Senate Committee Inquiries surrounding rural/remote GP supply issues, so it's not a complete surprise if it is indeed true.

If and when this goes through, JCU will become one of the biggest medical schools in Queensland in terms of total students (although still comfortably behind UQ).

I wanted to confirm that this is going ahead for this 2023. Our head of medical school is giving a talk on it soon and it has been reported by JCU media. However, at the current stage it looks like there will only be 20 additional places in Cairns in 2023

 

[YaoMingX]

I wanted to confirm that this is going ahead for this 2023. Our head of medical school is giving a talk on it soon and it has been reported by JCU media. However, at the current stage it looks like there will only be 20 additional places in Cairns in 2023

Keen to hear any updates, please keep me posted .

 

[Margaret]

Hi, Just wondering if anyone has experience on the first year timetable? I am applying for 2023 Entry and would need to plan well ahead as I have a family that I need to work around. I know its difficult to gain entry, but want to be prepared if I am lucky enough to get in. Thanks.

 

[MedHopeful99]

Hi, Just wondering if anyone has experience on the first year timetable? I am applying for 2023 Entry and would need to plan well ahead as I have a family that I need to work around. I know its difficult to gain entry, but want to be prepared if I am lucky enough to get in. Thanks.

I recall seeing this last year


That's second year, but since year1/2 are so similar, I think you can make reasonable inferences.

 

[tadpole]

Hi, Just wondering if anyone has experience on the first year timetable? I am applying for 2023 Entry and would need to plan well ahead as I have a family that I need to work around. I know its difficult to gain entry, but want to be prepared if I am lucky enough to get in. Thanks.

Just to add as a rough guide.. year one's have a week of orientation lectures starting Monday, 13th Feb 2023 with semester 1 exams finishing around Jun 12th. Semester 2 (including exams) from July 24- about November 13. There's a week-long lecture recess each semester and 9 hours of GP placement to be completed in the mid-year break.

 

[Margaret]

Just to add as a rough guide.. year one's have a week of orientation lectures starting Monday, 13th Feb 2023 with semester 1 exams finishing around Jun 12th. Semester 2 (including exams) from July 24- about November 13. There's a week-long lecture recess each semester and 9 hours of GP placement to be completed in the mid-year break.

Thank you!

 

[Rv2103]

Hi, can anyone please advise if JCU sends the interview invites to NZ students who appeared in their final year of high school? As none of my friend received any interview invite from JCU in first round. Any input is appreciated. thank you

 

[Crow]

Hi, can anyone please advise if JCU sends the interview invites to NZ students who appeared in their final year of high school? As none of my friend received any interview invite from JCU in first round. Any input is appreciated. thank you

Yes, if they meet the cutoff for an interview invite they can get one in either round.

 

[Rv2103]

Yes, if they meet the cutoff for an interview invite they can get one in either round.

thank you, appreciate the quick reply

 

[serotonin]

Hi, can anyone please advise if JCU sends the interview invites to NZ students who appeared in their final year of high school? As none of my friend received any interview invite from JCU in first round. Any input is appreciated. thank you

If you are currently doing NCEA, then yes, it does impact your eligibility for an interview or offer invite from JCU. Their information flyer states this info and recommends that you apply the year after.

 

[Rv2103]

If you are currently doing NCEA, then yes, it does impact your eligibility for an interview or offer invite from JCU. Their information flyer states this info and recommends that you apply the year after.

Thank you for the reply, yeah saw the brochure, that' s sad when all other universities are considering late NCEA results but JCU is not

 

[Dr Pepper]

Thank you for the reply, yeah saw the brochure, that' s sad when all other universities are considering late NCEA results but JCU is not

JCU don’t consider late results and NZ schools also don’t provide predicted ATAR so my kid decided not to apply JCU and saved preference for other QTAC programs.

 

[Stapedius]

Hey everyone! It's been a few weeks since 4th year exams finished so the itching necessity to be productive again has overcome me and I decided to update my original thread post to include a very brief summary of 4th year. In this post however I have just continued on and ranted incoherently about the year in review and for your own sanity I'd advise just reading the brief summary version in the original post. But for the masochists out there wanting to bore themselves with an overly nitty gritty rant of the year in time for Christmas; here you are:

4th Year - Bittersweet Change​

It’s that time of year again for me to provide my annual JCU medicine update! 4th year is truly done and dusted and it’s certainly been one to remember; although regrettably perhaps not for all the right reasons. I remember finishing 3rd year, feeling exhausted but cautiously optimistic for what the clinical years had to offer. I distinctly recall being driven by the soothing sentiment of seniors that “you’re much more free”, “it’s better than the preclinical years” and “you’ll start to feel like a real doctor”. I really, really wanted this to be true.

My experience is limited to the perspective of Townsville and so this might be different for the Cairns students, but unfortunately, the truth is - I found 4th year to be very underwhelming. This was nothing to do with the content; on the contrary I really liked learning about actual diseases, the pathophysiology behind them, key investigations, and management in a move away from the (let’s face it) clinically irrelevant nitty-gritty content that the preclinical years forces you to learn. I just found that there was an enormous lack of structure and disturbingly little teaching throughout the year, and this spoiled things for me a bit. For at least the first 6 months of the year, all of us were very confused as to what the university wanted from us, we found there was no real guidance given as to what to learn from each week and what was delivered in terms of teaching was so inconsistent, and in some many instances outdated and not in line with current clinical practice, leaving us more confused. Unfortunately, this was a shared feeling. I completely expected to do a lot of “self-directed learning” which tended to be the go-to phrase used by the university academics to describe the year, but literally teaching yourself the entire content for that week based on a list of expected learning outcomes which were very obviously rephrased lines of the AMC learning outcomes became frustrating, particularly when we have access to clinicians who could give us at least some feedback as to how to approach clinical scenarios and use diagnostic reasoning. Repeatedly stating “look it up on AMBOSS or eTG” became irritating, and it increasingly dissuaded us from actually wanting to go to uni during campus blocks. This led many of us in the year to simply not show up to optional classes and this resulted in a palpable mutual frustration between the academic staff and students in our year, with the academic staff blaming our attendance for our poor performance and dissatisfactions with the year rather than reflecting on possible teaching flaws. This sort of spoiled the year for me and left a bitter taste in my mouth that somewhat culminated in my motivation towards trying to put together a national clinical Medicine Anki deck which you can read more about here.

I have however tried to put aside my grievances with the way this year was run and be objective in my honest recap of the year. Also note that this is just my perspective and I’m sure it may vary person to person and rotation to rotation.

Course Structure and Overview​

For fourth year, you no longer abide by the typical university calendar, starting slightly earlier in the year in late January and finishing a week or so after everyone else in mid-late November. The year is split up into 5 terms which are each 6 weeks in length, with 4 additional 1-week base weeks throughout the year which lie either just before or just after certain terms depending on that year’s schedule. Between each term is typically a 1-week lecture recess, with about a month in the middle of the year between terms 3 and 4. Overall you have less holidays than preclinical years, but still more than 5th and 6th year.

1 of the 5 terms is your rural term which you spend the entire 6 weeks on a site in rural/remote Queensland. As of 2022 (and this is a big change since JCU emeritus Benjamin was at uni), the remaining 4 of the terms are subdivided into mini 3-week blocks, where you’re either allocated to the public hospital (Public), private hospital (Private) or campus (Campus). Depending on your allocated set order of rotations (shown below) which you preference earlier on in 3rd year, when you do all of these rotations will be slightly different, however everyone will have finished the year having done the same.

Timetable​

The timetabling system throughout the year was nothing short of chaos, with PDFs (yes, PDFs published from word documents) being used to schedule classes that were updated without notifying students, in many cases less than 24 hours in advance so you constantly had to log into Learn JCU (Blackboard software where everything’s uploaded) to check whether changes were made and constantly download the latest PDF to read. In some cases, you had multiple PDFs to read and collate which overlapped with each other, sometimes with conflicts so students had to send emails to the admin staff so classes could be rescheduled.

I have no idea who thought this system was a good idea, but quite a few of us gave pretty brutal feedback on this aspect of the year recently to the year coordinator and I now have it on good authority that a transition to Google calendar is planned for 2023. This should honestly make the year so much more efficient, as most of us ended up spending a good hour every few weeks transposing everything from the PDFs into our own Google/Microsoft calendars so we could be notified where we needed to be at what time, and it was easy to update when changes were made. I can imagine it was just as painful for admin staff to make and upload the 15 different rotations’ timetables onto Learn JCU as it was for us to read and use, so this is a hugely beneficial change if it’s implemented.

Placement Overview​

Rural Term​

Probably the best term you do throughout the year – as you’ve probably discovered by this point in the degree you actually do get to do a lot more on rural placement and learn the most “on the job” so to speak. I did my rural term first which has its pros and cons; it felt good to “get it out of the way” so I could then focus on seriously studying before exams, but I also knew a lot less clinical medicine than I do now having completed the year so was probably a lot less useful than I could have been. Often it’s hard to find dedicated study time when you’re at the hospital 8am-5:30pm, particularly if your supervisor is a bit more strict with your attendance so many do prefer to not have rural last however it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

But in summary rural was a great time – as has become typical for me I didn’t get any of my rural site preferences and so ended up with quite a remote site that no-one wanted, however I still found it enjoyable and the team at the hospital was supportive and that’s the main thing when you’re there for 6 weeks! You get the accommodation fully funded and also get fuel and internet subsidy (if your site doesn’t have WiFi, which was the case with me – yes, we’re rural alright) which means you only really have to fork out money for food during your rural term.

Public/Private Rotations​

I think all of us looked forward to placement which is one of the biggest components of 4th year, and while it’s nice to finally see patients on the wards, once again there was a ridiculous lack of direction and opportunities for active feedback that meant (in my opinion) a lot of time felt wasted and frivolous. Unlike 5th or 6th year where you get assigned to a particular medical team with a supervising doctor, in 4th year you're just randomly assigned to a ward (ie. cardiac ward) for 3 hours and basically that's about all the guidance you're given. You're sort of expected to chat to patients and do examinations. It’s really disappointing being thrown onto various wards, forced to wander around purposely into rooms with sick patients and take monotonous histories with no feedback as to whether what we’re actually doing is correct. I understand in 5th year we get assigned to teams so we can get feedback on our techniques in this respect, but there’s only so much you can learn by repeatedly taking a history by yourself with patients and your placement partner. I learnt far more on rural than I did at the actual tertiary hospitals in Townsville as a result of this. It honestly felt like a complete waste of time.

Subjects Overview​

Introduction​

Throughout the 5 terms the core content of fourth year is gradually delivered in the form of weekly “CLIs” (Core Learning Indicators) split into the core clinical “CLIs” and pathology “CLIs”. In terms of topics, here’s what we covered during each term in 2022:

• Term 1: Cardiovascular and Respiratory Medicine
• Term 2: Gastrointestinal and Renal Medicine
• Term 3: Endocrinology and Haematology/Oncology
• Term 4: Musculoskeletal and Neurological Medicine
• Term 5: Head and Neck, Infectious Diseases, Obs/Gyn (intro) and Sexual Health Medicine

By content delivery, all you get is the CLIs (essentially a list of learning outcomes; ie. Epidemiology, aetiology, risk factors, pathophysiology, diagnostic criteria, investigations, management, prevention for Acute Coronary Syndrome would be an example of one CLI in one week) posted the Friday preceding the new week and it’s expected you learn all the content around all the CLIs during the week, however aside from Pathology there are no dedicated lectures for the core clinical CLIs.

Pathology is delivered via recorded videos uploaded onto LearnJCU by an infamous pathologist, who I talk more about below. On Monday afternoon each week there is a mandatory “Clinical Pathological Review” (CPR) session which is basically a 1.5 hour session where we go through about 30 multiple choice questions written by some of the clinicians broadly covering the content of the CLIs for that week. So in summary, this in the only actual content delivered covering the week’s CLIs – the rest of our learning is solely “self-directed”.

Base Week​

The base weeks have a variety of different activities scheduled throughout the year. The first base week typically has introductory lectures from all the subjects. Then the other base weeks likely will have some dedicated anatomy lab sessions, additional clinical skills sessions if you’re about to go on rural and in many cases practice assessment items to give you an idea of the general wording of questions they might ask on the end of year exams. Your base weeks are where you also get the special one-off lectures on various different topics, like 6th year rotation preferences, ethics discussions etc. No new actual core CLI content is delivered. You also might do a few assessments that don’t fit into the term schedules like the patient health care journey presentation and clinical reasoning final assessment.

CPC​

Aside from rural where you might be mixed up with another group, you will be allocated to a “Clinical Pathological Cases” (CPC) group with ~10 other students in your rotation. There are usually three other CPCs in your rotation and the people in your CPC are the main people you see all year, as they’re the people who will be on placement or campus with you at the same time. Each week you will have a weekly “CPC session” run by a paid clinician or GP tutor and you’ll go through a specific case in detail for 3 years. You usually have the same GP/clinician for a whole term, then you get a new one for the next term. It’s basically JCU’s equivalent of “PBLs” which other universities have. On paper it’s a great idea – the problem is there is huge variation as to how the tutors run their sessions, with some simply reading through whatever JCU has written for them to say about the case (we don’t get the tutor notes), while some actually go through the CLIs at the start and see if our answers to the CLIs are in line with what’s high yield which can be more beneficial for us. Otherwise there’s pretty much no quality control as to whether what we’re learning is actually correct. Also, doing only one case each week feels grossly insufficient – 1 week of CLIs for example covers the entirety of upper GI medicine and when the only detailed CPC case you do is on peptic ulcer disease, you start to feel like you’re missing the fundamentals of all the other pathologies of the upper GIT; ie. GORD, Mallory Weiss tears, gastric cancer, etc. All of this is just expected to be self-taught with 0 guidance given.

Campus​

Family Studies​

Family Studies is typically run in your campus weeks, and covers the basics of paediatrics and early childhood development in preparation for your obstetrics/gynaecology term you do 5th year. Dr. Gorton is a lovely lecturer who keeps things relatively simple for you and admittedly many people end up cramming the content in the days before the exam and still do pretty well.

You also do a family studies placement at some point throughout the year where you go to a local GP clinic and spend a few hours chatting to nurses giving young babies and infants their immunisations.

Pathology​

Easily the worst subject ever delivered by a JCU medicine lecturer. Period. If you loved pathology before starting the course, you’ll hate it by the time the year’s done with. I’ve already written a lot about this as part of my collated feedback to the university regarding this subject, but essentially the TLDR is the lecturer who teaches it recorded his lectures 15 years ago, and as far as we can tell he hasn’t updated them in that time, with references to “new” 2006 news articles still in there. In 2022. Yes, in 2022. So as you can expect from such outdated slides, much of the content is outdated and straight up incorrect at times – the definition of status epilepticus was taught as >30 minutes sustained seizure activity, which is wrong; it’s 5 minutes. The aetiology of subacute bacterial endocarditis was said to be strep viridans – it is now staph aureus. Anyway this might come off as nitpicky, but it is so prevalent throughout all the slides that you start to realise you’re better off just going on AMBOSS and studying from there than the only dedicated lecture slides JCU provides. The lecturer is also a pathologist who ventures far beyond the realm of pathology by detailing this stuff – so you end up tossing up between learning what the lecturer delivers because they could be marking your exam or learning the actual correct knowledge in line with best practice. I ended up going with the latter because ultimately I could stomach that better, but it’s still pretty crazy we have to make that choice. This is also made harder by the fact that there are no dedicated learning resources nor any guide we’re given as to what to learn except to simply “learn it”. It just seems crazy that there is not a simple, even 30 minute lecture which summarises the main approach to the CLIs for each week; ie. A simple approach to dysphagia or “the key takeaways from investigating an acute stroke”. I feel like I really missed something like this this year – there’s only so much you can take away from a video on YouTube, and to have it delivered by actual Australian clinicians reflecting actual Australian guidelines would just be invaluable. Yes I know it’s probably in eTG somewhere, but that’s beside the point. Also – it has to be said that pathology is one aspect of clinical medicine, and arguably one of the lesser important ones; to have it as our only dedicated learning is just crazy. Spending an hour talking about the perivascular granulomatous inflammation of myocardial tissue or “Aschoff bodies” seen in acute rheumatic fever is great and all – but when this is your only “teaching” by the uni, you start to realise your study priorities might be misaligned.

CLIX​

Clinical Investigations or ‘CLIX’ as it’s often shortened to is an interesting subject where you learn all about the different bedside, laboratory, imaging and other special investigations for different medical specialties. It’s run by clinicians during your campus blocks, and as of 2022 there were:

• ABGs
• ECGs
• Electrolytes
• FBC/COAGs
• LFTs
• PFTs
• Radiology Abdomen
• Radiology Chest
• Radiology MSK
• Radiology Neurology
• Renal Function Tests/UECs

In Townsville you have Dr. Boyle, Dr. Simpson and Dr. Fenton teach the bulk of the course. Out of respect to the lecturers who are practicing clinicians, I’m not going to provide individual feedback. I have done this through the appropriate university-specific feedback pathways. But just in general I felt the teaching by some lecturers in particular was extremely subpar here that it led to me not even bothering to show up to class after a few campus CLIX sessions. In many instances, one of the lecturers would put on American YouTube videos and that would compose the entirety of ECG teaching. You’d think we would have these subjects taught by clinicians working in that subject speciality, but this was not the case in any of the cases except for haematology.

Clinical Reasoning​

Clinical Reasoning is run during your campus blocks by Dr. Nguy and she’s very knowledgeable. This in my opinion should be given more of a focus throughout the year, certainly more than the current focus on pathology. You basically watch a video at the start of the session detailing a fairly in depth history of a patient with a common presenting complaint. Once the video is done, you discuss possible differentials with “rule in” and “rule out” justifications, with a leading provisional diagnosis. This is then followed up with a brief discussion on investigations, diagnostic criteria and key management. Overall it’s fairly engaging, albeit sometimes stressful as Dr. Nguy does follow the “go around the circle” method of asking students for answers to her questions. However, I don’t mind this as long as you learn something and it’s done in a way that doesn’t humiliate students, which she didn’t. Pretty much the exact same format is used in your clinical reasoning exam at the end of the year.

Assessment​

On Course Hurdle Assessments​

At the end of each module (ie. CVS/RSP), you will have to pass a “focussed case hurdle” which is essentially a focussed examination for the system you’ve just finished based on the case you’re randomly given on the day. It sounds stressful, but as you do more of them, you do feel more comfortable with doing them. If you fail one of them, you will simply resit it later down the track.

During the final base week before the mid-year holidays, you’ll also notably do a mock OSCE hurdle. You need to pass the two stations, otherwise you’ll have to re-sit later in the year, but don’t stress if you do fail – in our year about half the year said pneumonia was the diagnosis on a respiratory exam case that was very obviously a pleural effusion, so half the year had to re-sit. There are no marks attached, so take this as a good learning experience in a safe sandbox.

You also have the dreaded professionalism PEAL assignments which I’m not even going to get into, because describing them might actually be duller than doing them. Thank god this year they’re P/F rather than graded like they are in the preclinical years.

On Course Graded Assessments​

At the end of each term you will submit an assessment specific to that rotation depending on whether you had rural (rural case write up) or public in the first 3 weeks (public case write up) of your term or private in the first 3 weeks of your term (private case write up). That just leaves the terms where you have public in the last 3 weeks (public oral case presentation) or private in the last 3 weeks of your term (private oral case presentation). This results in a total of (5) on course assignments throughout the year, each weighted at 3% for the total year (total of 15%). Generally speaking these assignments are relatively straightforward – you pick a case from a patient you spoke to on the wards or on rural, and with their permission and protecting patient confidentiality write (or in the case of the oral – deliver a speech in front of your CPC) about the case starting with the history of presenting complaint right down to management. There are some slight differences with each of the individual assignments but I’d rather not bore you with the details. Essentially you can’t do a case on the system (ie. CVS) more than once, and by the end of the year you develop some skills in how to write up patient notes in a systematic way, getting more concise as you get feedback throughout the year. I think in general these assignments were alright – I think they did help me get into the groove of writing logical case write ups for patients and detailing my diagnostic reasoning when it came to coming up with differentials.

On top of this, during either base week 2 or 3, you will be scheduled to do your ‘Patient Healthcare Journey’ (weighted 5%) presentation, where you deliver a dedicated oral presentation on some factors perceived by patients that have went through the healthcare system and you have to talk about some “barriers” and “enablers” to their health outcome during this experience.

The only other on course assessment you sit is in base week 3 and that is the Clinical Reasoning assessment which mirrors the experience laid out above during the “Clinical Reasoning” sessions. It is worth 3% of the year.

Final Examinations​

Come mid-November, you’ll have a total of 4 big examinations where the big chunk of your overall mark is taken from:

• CLIX Exam (10%)
• Paper 1: MCQ/EMQ exam (22%)
• Paper 2: KFP (23%)
• Paper 3: OSCE (24%)

In terms of changes from the preclinical years, you no longer do a short answer exam. Instead, the KFP is worth more, and OSCE weighting increases significantly. In my opinion, it’s very difficult to study for the KFP exam – most of the questions I could have answered at the start of the year, and the questions I didn’t know were niche questions that even the most diligent students would not have covered in their study of the CLIs.

Reflecting on my 4th year performance and other pseudophilosophical ramblings​

Overall I’m satisfied with my performance this year. While my OSCE marks were admittedly a bit of a disappointment compared to previous years (mainly because the stations I performed worse on were the stations I felt best about which is always the worst feeling), I was carried by my written examination marks which balanced things out thankfully.

It’s been some time now since marks released and while I am still a bit frustrated I didn’t perform as well in my OSCE, I think I’ve tried to tell myself that it is true that no one assessment is a reflection of your academic competency nor competency as a future doctor. I go back and try to listen to my 1st year self parroting this to others on this exact website, but the main thing really is passing overall, and anything above that is just a nicety. I’ve seen some of my other admittedly high-achieving friends hold themselves to this extremely high academic standard that getting anything less than a HD breaks them emotionally, particularly if this has become their expected mark. The stress and anxiety that this can lead to is real and shouldn’t be immediately dismissed and I think it’s partly why so many medical schools have opted for a pass/fail system (JCU still has a graded system).

In many respects I disagree with JCU’s practice of emailing out breakdown of marks to students, showing the year average with your marks, and the lowest and highest marks of the year. I can understand some students love this to compare themselves to others (I myself admit I found it quite nice to see when I was topping some of my subjects in the preclin years), but it breeds a sort of implicit hierarchy in a degree that should ultimately be collaborative and classless. Unlike many of my friends at other med schools, we do not get any written feedback for any of our written exams, nor the station marking criteria from our OSCE stations – just the overall mark. So in one of my OSCE stations where I performed quite poorly overall, I am simply left wondering what I missed. I find this another frustrating aspect of the way JCU runs things – throughout the year they’re very careful not to release any form of marking criteria or assessment examples. Probably because they want to be able to repeat assessments in future years and releasing it publicly would be problematic but still, this is hard to stomach as a student wanting to improve.

At least next year we're assigned to teams on the wards, so hopefully there is a positive change on the horizon! It is exciting to think I only have one more set of exams before I'm finished. And that's about it for my rant for now!

 

[Benjamin]

At least next year we're assigned to teams on the wards, so hopefully there is a positive change on the horizon! It is exciting to think I only have one more set of exams before I'm finished. And that's about it for my rant for now!

Thanks for writing this up, Stapedius.

Overall it reads much like my feelings post 4th year medical school at JCU - teaching provided by the university were largely inferior to actually learning on the ward (when it was available), the pathology lectures broke me and ultimately I abandoned them entirely moving instead to just learning out of the textbook directly with ANKI flash cards made of the lecture slides... and I struggled with the idea of being expected to know somehow ??everything?? despite it not being covered.

I remember feeling almost exactly the same as you seem to feel - frustrated that the medical school I had set myself behind had suddenly lost all ability to provide good lectures or consistent teaching. How could they possibly just rely entirely on staff working in the hospital to provide largely incidental teaching?????

Unfortunately this is essentially the reality of your training from here on out. In 5th & 6th year you will be assigned to a team but as a result are entirely at the mercy of that team for your teaching - if you happen to get a good registrar / resident / consultant mix and they also have time then you will have excellent teaching opportunities. If you are put on a team where any of those three are struggling in any way then things will be more difficult.

The best thing you can do for learning opportunities is to literally embed yourself into the team, which once again is easy if you have a good team but very difficult if you feel like a complete outsider. Doing the "scutwork" is actually a good way to get yourself more teaching opportunities - ultimately, if your team is less busy then they will have more time to teach! - and is also an excellent way to actually learn how to do the job of an intern.

Sidenote: by "scutwork" I would specifically exclude discharge summaries - there is a lot to be learnt about them but if you don't have someone guiding you through then it will be a useless exercise both for you and the person who ultimately receives the discharge summary.

By the "reality of your training" I literally mean the rest of your career. As an intern you will get regular teaching but are almost entirely at the mercy of your team for teaching. As a resident you are expected to teach the intern and your dedicated teaching time is lost, instead only getting exposure to teaching you either seek out yourself, at Grand Rounds or internal department teaching. Registrar time is meant to include specific teaching as part of your college time but once again, this is often an adjunct to study you have done in your own time rather than the foundation.

This is the reality of the "lifelong commitment to learning" that every medical school asks of you in their interviews - your learning rapidly becomes your own responsibility & it becomes a sink-or-swim world very quickly.

 

[Stapedius]

Thanks for writing this up, Stapedius.

Overall it reads much like my feelings post 4th year medical school at JCU - teaching provided by the university were largely inferior to actually learning on the ward (when it was available), the pathology lectures broke me and ultimately I abandoned them entirely moving instead to just learning out of the textbook directly with ANKI flash cards made of the lecture slides... and I struggled with the idea of being expected to know somehow ??everything?? despite it not being covered.

I remember feeling almost exactly the same as you seem to feel - frustrated that the medical school I had set myself behind had suddenly lost all ability to provide good lectures or consistent teaching. How could they possibly just rely entirely on staff working in the hospital to provide largely incidental teaching?????

Unfortunately this is essentially the reality of your training from here on out. In 5th & 6th year you will be assigned to a team but as a result are entirely at the mercy of that team for your teaching - if you happen to get a good registrar / resident / consultant mix and they also have time then you will have excellent teaching opportunities. If you are put on a team where any of those three are struggling in any way then things will be more difficult.

The best thing you can do for learning opportunities is to literally embed yourself into the team, which once again is easy if you have a good team but very difficult if you feel like a complete outsider. Doing the "scutwork" is actually a good way to get yourself more teaching opportunities - ultimately, if your team is less busy then they will have more time to teach! - and is also an excellent way to actually learn how to do the job of an intern.

Sidenote: by "scutwork" I would specifically exclude discharge summaries - there is a lot to be learnt about them but if you don't have someone guiding you through then it will be a useless exercise both for you and the person who ultimately receives the discharge summary.

By the "reality of your training" I literally mean the rest of your career. As an intern you will get regular teaching but are almost entirely at the mercy of your team for teaching. As a resident you are expected to teach the intern and your dedicated teaching time is lost, instead only getting exposure to teaching you either seek out yourself, at Grand Rounds or internal department teaching. Registrar time is meant to include specific teaching as part of your college time but once again, this is often an adjunct to study you have done in your own time rather than the foundation.

This is the reality of the "lifelong commitment to learning" that every medical school asks of you in their interviews - your learning rapidly becomes your own responsibility & it becomes a sink-or-swim world very quickly.

Thanks so much Benjamin,

In a weird way it's comforting knowing that Year 4 pathology at JCU has been the same hellish nightmare for years. I'll definitely try and integrate myself as much as I can with teams on the wards next year (particularly those that are especially keen on teaching), and hopefully I'll start to adapt to this new way of learning which no doubt will continue for many, many years to come.

 

[RuralDr]

Hey everyone! It's been a few weeks since 4th year exams finished so the itching necessity to be productive again has overcome me and I decided to update my original thread post to include a very brief summary of 4th year. In this post however I have just continued on and ranted incoherently about the year in review and for your own sanity I'd advise just reading the brief summary version in the original post. But for the masochists out there wanting to bore themselves with an overly nitty gritty rant of the year in time for Christmas; here you are:

4th Year - Bittersweet Change​

It’s that time of year again for me to provide my annual JCU medicine update! 4th year is truly done and dusted and it’s certainly been one to remember; although regrettably perhaps not for all the right reasons. I remember finishing 3rd year, feeling exhausted but cautiously optimistic for what the clinical years had to offer. I distinctly recall being driven by the soothing sentiment of seniors that “you’re much more free”, “it’s better than the preclinical years” and “you’ll start to feel like a real doctor”. I really, really wanted this to be true.

My experience is limited to the perspective of Townsville and so this might be different for the Cairns students, but unfortunately, the truth is - I found 4th year to be very underwhelming. This was nothing to do with the content; on the contrary I really liked learning about actual diseases, the pathophysiology behind them, key investigations, and management in a move away from the (let’s face it) clinically irrelevant nitty-gritty content that the preclinical years forces you to learn. I just found that there was an enormous lack of structure and disturbingly little teaching throughout the year, and this spoiled things for me a bit. For at least the first 6 months of the year, all of us were very confused as to what the university wanted from us, we found there was no real guidance given as to what to learn from each week and what was delivered in terms of teaching was so inconsistent, and in some many instances outdated and not in line with current clinical practice, leaving us more confused. Unfortunately, this was a shared feeling. I completely expected to do a lot of “self-directed learning” which tended to be the go-to phrase used by the university academics to describe the year, but literally teaching yourself the entire content for that week based on a list of expected learning outcomes which were very obviously rephrased lines of the AMC learning outcomes became frustrating, particularly when we have access to clinicians who could give us at least some feedback as to how to approach clinical scenarios and use diagnostic reasoning. Repeatedly stating “look it up on AMBOSS or eTG” became irritating, and it increasingly dissuaded us from actually wanting to go to uni during campus blocks. This led many of us in the year to simply not show up to optional classes and this resulted in a palpable mutual frustration between the academic staff and students in our year, with the academic staff blaming our attendance for our poor performance and dissatisfactions with the year rather than reflecting on possible teaching flaws. This sort of spoiled the year for me and left a bitter taste in my mouth that somewhat culminated in my motivation towards trying to put together a national clinical Medicine Anki deck which you can read more about here.

I have however tried to put aside my grievances with the way this year was run and be objective in my honest recap of the year. Also note that this is just my perspective and I’m sure it may vary person to person and rotation to rotation.

Course Structure and Overview​

For fourth year, you no longer abide by the typical university calendar, starting slightly earlier in the year in late January and finishing a week or so after everyone else in mid-late November. The year is split up into 5 terms which are each 6 weeks in length, with 4 additional 1-week base weeks throughout the year which lie either just before or just after certain terms depending on that year’s schedule. Between each term is typically a 1-week lecture recess, with about a month in the middle of the year between terms 3 and 4. Overall you have less holidays than preclinical years, but still more than 5th and 6th year.

1 of the 5 terms is your rural term which you spend the entire 6 weeks on a site in rural/remote Queensland. As of 2022 (and this is a big change since JCU emeritus Benjamin was at uni), the remaining 4 of the terms are subdivided into mini 3-week blocks, where you’re either allocated to the public hospital (Public), private hospital (Private) or campus (Campus). Depending on your allocated set order of rotations (shown below) which you preference earlier on in 3rd year, when you do all of these rotations will be slightly different, however everyone will have finished the year having done the same.

Timetable​

The timetabling system throughout the year was nothing short of chaos, with PDFs (yes, PDFs published from word documents) being used to schedule classes that were updated without notifying students, in many cases less than 24 hours in advance so you constantly had to log into Learn JCU (Blackboard software where everything’s uploaded) to check whether changes were made and constantly download the latest PDF to read. In some cases, you had multiple PDFs to read and collate which overlapped with each other, sometimes with conflicts so students had to send emails to the admin staff so classes could be rescheduled.

I have no idea who thought this system was a good idea, but quite a few of us gave pretty brutal feedback on this aspect of the year recently to the year coordinator and I now have it on good authority that a transition to Google calendar is planned for 2023. This should honestly make the year so much more efficient, as most of us ended up spending a good hour every few weeks transposing everything from the PDFs into our own Google/Microsoft calendars so we could be notified where we needed to be at what time, and it was easy to update when changes were made. I can imagine it was just as painful for admin staff to make and upload the 15 different rotations’ timetables onto Learn JCU as it was for us to read and use, so this is a hugely beneficial change if it’s implemented.

Placement Overview​

Rural Term​

Probably the best term you do throughout the year – as you’ve probably discovered by this point in the degree you actually do get to do a lot more on rural placement and learn the most “on the job” so to speak. I did my rural term first which has its pros and cons; it felt good to “get it out of the way” so I could then focus on seriously studying before exams, but I also knew a lot less clinical medicine than I do now having completed the year so was probably a lot less useful than I could have been. Often it’s hard to find dedicated study time when you’re at the hospital 8am-5:30pm, particularly if your supervisor is a bit more strict with your attendance so many do prefer to not have rural last however it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

But in summary rural was a great time – as has become typical for me I didn’t get any of my rural site preferences and so ended up with quite a remote site that no-one wanted, however I still found it enjoyable and the team at the hospital was supportive and that’s the main thing when you’re there for 6 weeks! You get the accommodation fully funded and also get fuel and internet subsidy (if your site doesn’t have WiFi, which was the case with me – yes, we’re rural alright) which means you only really have to fork out money for food during your rural term.

Public/Private Rotations​

I think all of us looked forward to placement which is one of the biggest components of 4th year, and while it’s nice to finally see patients on the wards, once again there was a ridiculous lack of direction and opportunities for active feedback that meant (in my opinion) a lot of time felt wasted and frivolous. Unlike 5th or 6th year where you get assigned to a particular medical team with a supervising doctor, in 4th year you're just randomly assigned to a ward (ie. cardiac ward) for 3 hours and basically that's about all the guidance you're given. You're sort of expected to chat to patients and do examinations. It’s really disappointing being thrown onto various wards, forced to wander around purposely into rooms with sick patients and take monotonous histories with no feedback as to whether what we’re actually doing is correct. I understand in 5th year we get assigned to teams so we can get feedback on our techniques in this respect, but there’s only so much you can learn by repeatedly taking a history by yourself with patients and your placement partner. I learnt far more on rural than I did at the actual tertiary hospitals in Townsville as a result of this. It honestly felt like a complete waste of time.

Subjects Overview​

Introduction​

Throughout the 5 terms the core content of fourth year is gradually delivered in the form of weekly “CLIs” (Core Learning Indicators) split into the core clinical “CLIs” and pathology “CLIs”. In terms of topics, here’s what we covered during each term in 2022:

• Term 1: Cardiovascular and Respiratory Medicine
• Term 2: Gastrointestinal and Renal Medicine
• Term 3: Endocrinology and Haematology/Oncology
• Term 4: Musculoskeletal and Neurological Medicine
• Term 5: Head and Neck, Infectious Diseases, Obs/Gyn (intro) and Sexual Health Medicine

By content delivery, all you get is the CLIs (essentially a list of learning outcomes; ie. Epidemiology, aetiology, risk factors, pathophysiology, diagnostic criteria, investigations, management, prevention for Acute Coronary Syndrome would be an example of one CLI in one week) posted the Friday preceding the new week and it’s expected you learn all the content around all the CLIs during the week, however aside from Pathology there are no dedicated lectures for the core clinical CLIs.

Pathology is delivered via recorded videos uploaded onto LearnJCU by an infamous pathologist, who I talk more about below. On Monday afternoon each week there is a mandatory “Clinical Pathological Review” (CPR) session which is basically a 1.5 hour session where we go through about 30 multiple choice questions written by some of the clinicians broadly covering the content of the CLIs for that week. So in summary, this in the only actual content delivered covering the week’s CLIs – the rest of our learning is solely “self-directed”.

Base Week​

The base weeks have a variety of different activities scheduled throughout the year. The first base week typically has introductory lectures from all the subjects. Then the other base weeks likely will have some dedicated anatomy lab sessions, additional clinical skills sessions if you’re about to go on rural and in many cases practice assessment items to give you an idea of the general wording of questions they might ask on the end of year exams. Your base weeks are where you also get the special one-off lectures on various different topics, like 6th year rotation preferences, ethics discussions etc. No new actual core CLI content is delivered. You also might do a few assessments that don’t fit into the term schedules like the patient health care journey presentation and clinical reasoning final assessment.

CPC​

Aside from rural where you might be mixed up with another group, you will be allocated to a “Clinical Pathological Cases” (CPC) group with ~10 other students in your rotation. There are usually three other CPCs in your rotation and the people in your CPC are the main people you see all year, as they’re the people who will be on placement or campus with you at the same time. Each week you will have a weekly “CPC session” run by a paid clinician or GP tutor and you’ll go through a specific case in detail for 3 years. You usually have the same GP/clinician for a whole term, then you get a new one for the next term. It’s basically JCU’s equivalent of “PBLs” which other universities have. On paper it’s a great idea – the problem is there is huge variation as to how the tutors run their sessions, with some simply reading through whatever JCU has written for them to say about the case (we don’t get the tutor notes), while some actually go through the CLIs at the start and see if our answers to the CLIs are in line with what’s high yield which can be more beneficial for us. Otherwise there’s pretty much no quality control as to whether what we’re learning is actually correct. Also, doing only one case each week feels grossly insufficient – 1 week of CLIs for example covers the entirety of upper GI medicine and when the only detailed CPC case you do is on peptic ulcer disease, you start to feel like you’re missing the fundamentals of all the other pathologies of the upper GIT; ie. GORD, Mallory Weiss tears, gastric cancer, etc. All of this is just expected to be self-taught with 0 guidance given.

Campus​

Family Studies​

Family Studies is typically run in your campus weeks, and covers the basics of paediatrics and early childhood development in preparation for your obstetrics/gynaecology term you do 5th year. Dr. Gorton is a lovely lecturer who keeps things relatively simple for you and admittedly many people end up cramming the content in the days before the exam and still do pretty well.

You also do a family studies placement at some point throughout the year where you go to a local GP clinic and spend a few hours chatting to nurses giving young babies and infants their immunisations.

Pathology​

Easily the worst subject ever delivered by a JCU medicine lecturer. Period. If you loved pathology before starting the course, you’ll hate it by the time the year’s done with. I’ve already written a lot about this as part of my collated feedback to the university regarding this subject, but essentially the TLDR is the lecturer who teaches it recorded his lectures 15 years ago, and as far as we can tell he hasn’t updated them in that time, with references to “new” 2006 news articles still in there. In 2022. Yes, in 2022. So as you can expect from such outdated slides, much of the content is outdated and straight up incorrect at times – the definition of status epilepticus was taught as >30 minutes sustained seizure activity, which is wrong; it’s 5 minutes. The aetiology of subacute bacterial endocarditis was said to be strep viridans – it is now staph aureus. Anyway this might come off as nitpicky, but it is so prevalent throughout all the slides that you start to realise you’re better off just going on AMBOSS and studying from there than the only dedicated lecture slides JCU provides. The lecturer is also a pathologist who ventures far beyond the realm of pathology by detailing this stuff – so you end up tossing up between learning what the lecturer delivers because they could be marking your exam or learning the actual correct knowledge in line with best practice. I ended up going with the latter because ultimately I could stomach that better, but it’s still pretty crazy we have to make that choice. This is also made harder by the fact that there are no dedicated learning resources nor any guide we’re given as to what to learn except to simply “learn it”. It just seems crazy that there is not a simple, even 30 minute lecture which summarises the main approach to the CLIs for each week; ie. A simple approach to dysphagia or “the key takeaways from investigating an acute stroke”. I feel like I really missed something like this this year – there’s only so much you can take away from a video on YouTube, and to have it delivered by actual Australian clinicians reflecting actual Australian guidelines would just be invaluable. Yes I know it’s probably in eTG somewhere, but that’s beside the point. Also – it has to be said that pathology is one aspect of clinical medicine, and arguably one of the lesser important ones; to have it as our only dedicated learning is just crazy. Spending an hour talking about the perivascular granulomatous inflammation of myocardial tissue or “Aschoff bodies” seen in acute rheumatic fever is great and all – but when this is your only “teaching” by the uni, you start to realise your study priorities might be misaligned.

CLIX​

Clinical Investigations or ‘CLIX’ as it’s often shortened to is an interesting subject where you learn all about the different bedside, laboratory, imaging and other special investigations for different medical specialties. It’s run by clinicians during your campus blocks, and as of 2022 there were:

• ABGs
• ECGs
• Electrolytes
• FBC/COAGs
• LFTs
• PFTs
• Radiology Abdomen
• Radiology Chest
• Radiology MSK
• Radiology Neurology
• Renal Function Tests/UECs

In Townsville you have Dr. Boyle, Dr. Simpson and Dr. Fenton teach the bulk of the course. Out of respect to the lecturers who are practicing clinicians, I’m not going to provide individual feedback. I have done this through the appropriate university-specific feedback pathways. But just in general I felt the teaching by some lecturers in particular was extremely subpar here that it led to me not even bothering to show up to class after a few campus CLIX sessions. In many instances, one of the lecturers would put on American YouTube videos and that would compose the entirety of ECG teaching. You’d think we would have these subjects taught by clinicians working in that subject speciality, but this was not the case in any of the cases except for haematology.

Clinical Reasoning​

Clinical Reasoning is run during your campus blocks by Dr. Nguy and she’s very knowledgeable. This in my opinion should be given more of a focus throughout the year, certainly more than the current focus on pathology. You basically watch a video at the start of the session detailing a fairly in depth history of a patient with a common presenting complaint. Once the video is done, you discuss possible differentials with “rule in” and “rule out” justifications, with a leading provisional diagnosis. This is then followed up with a brief discussion on investigations, diagnostic criteria and key management. Overall it’s fairly engaging, albeit sometimes stressful as Dr. Nguy does follow the “go around the circle” method of asking students for answers to her questions. However, I don’t mind this as long as you learn something and it’s done in a way that doesn’t humiliate students, which she didn’t. Pretty much the exact same format is used in your clinical reasoning exam at the end of the year.

Assessment​

On Course Hurdle Assessments​

At the end of each module (ie. CVS/RSP), you will have to pass a “focussed case hurdle” which is essentially a focussed examination for the system you’ve just finished based on the case you’re randomly given on the day. It sounds stressful, but as you do more of them, you do feel more comfortable with doing them. If you fail one of them, you will simply resit it later down the track.

During the final base week before the mid-year holidays, you’ll also notably do a mock OSCE hurdle. You need to pass the two stations, otherwise you’ll have to re-sit later in the year, but don’t stress if you do fail – in our year about half the year said pneumonia was the diagnosis on a respiratory exam case that was very obviously a pleural effusion, so half the year had to re-sit. There are no marks attached, so take this as a good learning experience in a safe sandbox.

You also have the dreaded professionalism PEAL assignments which I’m not even going to get into, because describing them might actually be duller than doing them. Thank god this year they’re P/F rather than graded like they are in the preclinical years.

On Course Graded Assessments​

At the end of each term you will submit an assessment specific to that rotation depending on whether you had rural (rural case write up) or public in the first 3 weeks (public case write up) of your term or private in the first 3 weeks of your term (private case write up). That just leaves the terms where you have public in the last 3 weeks (public oral case presentation) or private in the last 3 weeks of your term (private oral case presentation). This results in a total of (5) on course assignments throughout the year, each weighted at 3% for the total year (total of 15%). Generally speaking these assignments are relatively straightforward – you pick a case from a patient you spoke to on the wards or on rural, and with their permission and protecting patient confidentiality write (or in the case of the oral – deliver a speech in front of your CPC) about the case starting with the history of presenting complaint right down to management. There are some slight differences with each of the individual assignments but I’d rather not bore you with the details. Essentially you can’t do a case on the system (ie. CVS) more than once, and by the end of the year you develop some skills in how to write up patient notes in a systematic way, getting more concise as you get feedback throughout the year. I think in general these assignments were alright – I think they did help me get into the groove of writing logical case write ups for patients and detailing my diagnostic reasoning when it came to coming up with differentials.

On top of this, during either base week 2 or 3, you will be scheduled to do your ‘Patient Healthcare Journey’ (weighted 5%) presentation, where you deliver a dedicated oral presentation on some factors perceived by patients that have went through the healthcare system and you have to talk about some “barriers” and “enablers” to their health outcome during this experience.

The only other on course assessment you sit is in base week 3 and that is the Clinical Reasoning assessment which mirrors the experience laid out above during the “Clinical Reasoning” sessions. It is worth 3% of the year.

Final Examinations​

Come mid-November, you’ll have a total of 4 big examinations where the big chunk of your overall mark is taken from:

• CLIX Exam (10%)
• Paper 1: MCQ/EMQ exam (22%)
• Paper 2: KFP (23%)
• Paper 3: OSCE (24%)

In terms of changes from the preclinical years, you no longer do a short answer exam. Instead, the KFP is worth more, and OSCE weighting increases significantly. In my opinion, it’s very difficult to study for the KFP exam – most of the questions I could have answered at the start of the year, and the questions I didn’t know were niche questions that even the most diligent students would not have covered in their study of the CLIs.

Reflecting on my 4th year performance and other pseudophilosophical ramblings​

Overall I’m satisfied with my performance this year. While my OSCE marks were admittedly a bit of a disappointment compared to previous years (mainly because the stations I performed worse on were the stations I felt best about which is always the worst feeling), I was carried by my written examination marks which balanced things out thankfully.

It’s been some time now since marks released and while I am still a bit frustrated I didn’t perform as well in my OSCE, I think I’ve tried to tell myself that it is true that no one assessment is a reflection of your academic competency nor competency as a future doctor. I go back and try to listen to my 1st year self parroting this to others on this exact website, but the main thing really is passing overall, and anything above that is just a nicety. I’ve seen some of my other admittedly high-achieving friends hold themselves to this extremely high academic standard that getting anything less than a HD breaks them emotionally, particularly if this has become their expected mark. The stress and anxiety that this can lead to is real and shouldn’t be immediately dismissed and I think it’s partly why so many medical schools have opted for a pass/fail system (JCU still has a graded system).

In many respects I disagree with JCU’s practice of emailing out breakdown of marks to students, showing the year average with your marks, and the lowest and highest marks of the year. I can understand some students love this to compare themselves to others (I myself admit I found it quite nice to see when I was topping some of my subjects in the preclin years), but it breeds a sort of implicit hierarchy in a degree that should ultimately be collaborative and classless. Unlike many of my friends at other med schools, we do not get any written feedback for any of our written exams, nor the station marking criteria from our OSCE stations – just the overall mark. So in one of my OSCE stations where I performed quite poorly overall, I am simply left wondering what I missed. I find this another frustrating aspect of the way JCU runs things – throughout the year they’re very careful not to release any form of marking criteria or assessment examples. Probably because they want to be able to repeat assessments in future years and releasing it publicly would be problematic but still, this is hard to stomach as a student wanting to improve.

At least next year we're assigned to teams on the wards, so hopefully there is a positive change on the horizon! It is exciting to think I only have one more set of exams before I'm finished. And that's about it for my rant for now!

HI (mod note: name removed, just in case),

Thanks for such a great guide. With 4th year, how much time did you spend on site at your placements?

Thanks

 

[Stapedius]

HI (mod note: name removed, just in case),

Thanks for such a great guide. With 4th year, how much time did you spend on site at your placements?

Thanks

Thanks! My real name isn't actually the one you originally referred to, but I appreciate the mods stepping in anyway! As for how much time I spent on placement, it really does vary. For public and private you typically get allocated a 3-4 hour block 4 days a week on various wards (although very rarely would you actually stay the full duration) with the other remaining weekday spent doing clinical skills with the JCU academic team. Rural is a bit more rigorous depending on what site you get and can be a 8-5 sort of regime 5 days a week. Hope that helps!

 

[Rora]

Can students who get townsville as their site in yr4 choose cairns for yrs 5 & 6? Also are there any JCU students in Mackay who can share their experience please? Mackay hospital has been getting negative reviews in the media since last year and it seems that JCU is still sending students there.

 

[Stapedius]

Can students who get townsville as their site in yr4 choose cairns for yrs 5 & 6? Also are there any JCU students in Mackay who can share their experience please? Mackay hospital has been getting negative reviews in the media since last year and it seems that JCU is still sending students there.

There are a small number (I would estimate <5) of people who manage to swap from Townsville to Cairns for 5th year, and mainly depends on the number of Cairns people wanting to swap out of Cairns for that year. Preferencing Cairns while in Townsville in 4th year doesn't guarantee you Cairns though, unlike the Cairns cohort (the odds of getting Mackay is the same as anyone not preferencing Mackay in Townsville). I will try and get someone from Mackay in the next week or so to send me a summary of their experience so far and I'll post it here on behalf of them.

Despite this, I think it's important to note that negative reviews of a hospital in the media doesn't mean the student placement experience will be affected. My understanding of the matter you're referring to was that there were some long-standing deficits in medical standards of care by senior management which mainly surrounded the Obs/Gyn department, and led to the whole MBH board to get the sack as the QLD gov wasn't convinced enough was done to improve things. Since the board has been reset, in theory things should have improved, but I don't know enough about the issue to really comment on this. That being said, I'm not convinced that these sorts of management issues are likely to affect students, who mainly work with the junior doctors (ie. JHOs/Registrars) who had little to do with the issues described. On the contrary, anecdotally, the Mackay cohort tends to report better clinical experience given the greater doctor to student ratio. I'm curious whether Benjamin has an opinion on the matter from the perspective of someone working in QLD Health?