Introducing the clinical school
Bendigo is a vibrant regional city of around 100,000 people. The medical community in Bendigo has long hosted medical students from both Monash University and the University of Melbourne who are all based at the Bendigo Regional Clinical School. The school is located in the health education and research precinct along with the Bendigo Primary Care Centre and the La Trobe University Rural Health School. The precinct itself is located between the acute and rehabilitation campuses of Bendigo Health.
Bendigo Health is spread over a number of campuses and serves an area nearly a quarter the size of Victoria. A 672 bed multi-disciplinary service, it incorporates medical, surgical, rehabilitation, psychiatric care (both in-patient and community-based), aged care and ambulatory and community services. Speciality services at the hospital include critical care, cardiology, renal dialysis, maternal and women’s health, child and adolescent health, oncology, orthopaedic services. The two campuses of the 225 acute bed teaching hospital are located about 2 km from the centre of Bendigo. Acute services are located in the main hospital campus, while rehabilitation services are housed at the Anne Caudle Centre.
Our programs
Year 3
Year 3 is largely based in Bendigo hospital.
Year 4
Year 4 in the north-west consists of a semester-long rural rotation and a semester-long regional rotation in either Mildura or Bendigo. Bendigo hosts all Year 4 students for the initial week of each semester.
During the regional rotation students have greater exposure to the core disciplines of Year 4: children’s health, women’s health and medicine of the mind. Consolidation and integration of these disciplines occur in a GP placement for one day each week. Students have learning opportunities with paediatricians, obstetricians and gynaecologists, psychiatrists and general practitioners, and the teams of practitioners, nurses and allied health professionals who work with them.
During this semester the emphasis is on the specialist services available to patients in a larger regional centre like Bendigo. The platform for integrating and embedding specialist knowledge and skills is the one-day-per-week GP placement with parallel consulting alongside the student's GP supervisor.
Year 5/final year
Final year Monash students complete seven six-week rotations. The seven rotations consist of five core rotations (aged care, emergency medicine, medicine, surgery and speciality), a student elective and a vacation.
Based at Bendigo Health, Bendigo Regional Clinical School offers four of the core subjects:
- medicine
- surgery
- emergency medicine
- aged care
And two electives:
- radiology
- intensive care/anaesthesia
