The St Lucia Clinical Unit is one of the main homes for students in Phase 1 of the MD program, and is the primary base for year 1 students. The unit is staffed by a team of academic and professional staff who lead the delivery of courses in Clinical Science, Clinical Practice, Ethics and Professional Practice, Integrated Clinical Studies and key selective courses.
The staff in the unit work closely with academics in the School of Biomedical Sciences, the School of Chemical and Molecular Biosciences, the School of Public Health, and the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, as well as engaging clinicians from the Faculty’s hospitals and elsewhere to contribute to year 1 and 2 courses.
The academic staff also support several scholarly projects to enhance learning and teaching in the MD, and collaboratively support our large team of casual tutors.
Courses We Teach
Clinical Practice:
MEDI7121 | Clinical Practice 1 |
Course coordinator: Dr Sharee Stedman - med.clinicalpractice1@uq.edu.au |
MEDI7122 | Clinical Practice 2 |
Course coordinator: Dr Venkat Reddy - med.clinicalpractice1@uq.edu.au |
MEDI7221 | Clinical Practice 3 |
Course coordinator: TBC - med.clinicalpractice2@uq.edu.au |
MEDI7222 | Clinical Practice 4 |
Course coordinator:TBC - med.clinicalpractice2@uq.edu.au |
Other Clinical Practice Coordinators:
Ms Belinda Swyny (Lecturer in Clinical Medicine) - b.swyny@uq.edu.au
Dr Jennifer Fitzgerald (Clinical Communication Skills) - jenny.fitzgerald@uq.edu.au
Ms Maree Keller (Procedural Skill Workshops) - maree.keller@uq.edu.au
Ethics and Professional Practice:
MEDI7131 | EPP 1 |
Course coordinator: TBC - med.yr1ethics@uq.edu.au |
MEDI7132 | EPP 2 |
Course coordinator: TBC- med.yr1ethics@uq.edu.au |
MEDI7231 | EPP 3 |
Course coordinator: TBC- med.yr2ethics@uq.edu.au |
MEDI7232 | EPP 4 |
Course coordinator: TBC- med.yr2ethics@uq.edu.au |
Clinical Science:
Course and Module Coordinators Details. See attached a list of Clinical Science (CS) courses modules, duration, coordinators and email addresses for 2021. Course and module list for Semester 2 CS2 is as per 2020, with 2021 coordinators to be confirmed.
MEDI7111 | Clinical Science 1 |
Course coordinator: Dr Pieter Jansen - med.yr1clinicalscience@uq.edu.au |
MEDI7112 | Clinical Science 2 |
Course coordinator: Dr Ben Barry - med.yr1clinicalscience@uq.edu.au |
MEDI7211 | Clinical Science 3 |
Course coordinator: Dr Joan Li - med.yr2clinicalscience@uq.edu.au |
Other Clinical Science Coordinators:
Dr Ashlee Forster - ashlee.forster@uq.edu.au
Dr Christian Gray - c.gray@uq.edu.au
Dr Iulia Oancea - i.oancea1@uq.edu.au
Dr Sam Chan - samuel.chan@uq.edu.au
Dr Sharon Darlington - sharon.darlington@uq.edu.au
Dr Venkat Reddy - v.reddy@uq.edu.au
Other course contributors: Dr Claire Aland, Prof. Mark Midwinter, Dr Suja Pillai, Dr Peter Simpson, Assoc Prof Glenda Gobe, Dr Mary-Louise Roy-Manchadi, Dr Sherry Wu, Dr Melissa Reichelt, Dr Peter Landy, Dr Justin Ridge, Dr Marloes Dekker, Assoc. Prof. Joe Rothnagel, Dr Jack Wang, Dr Julia Pagan
MEDI7212 Integrated Clinical Studies
Course Details: the attached course themes and coordinators is as per 2020, with 2021 order and respective coordinators to be confirmed.
Course Coordinator: Dr Iulia Oancea - med.yr2clinicalscience@uq.edu.au
Course design team: Dr Ben Barry, Ms Nicole Shepherd, Dr Peter Hill, Dr Sue Vlack
Health, Society and Research courses are led by the School of Public Health. Course contacts are as follows :
MEDI7101: Health, Society & Research 1 - Course Coordinator: A/Prof Linda Selvey
MEDI7102: Health, Society & Research 2 - Course Coordinator: A/Prof Susan Jordan
MEDI7201: Health, Society & Research 3 - Course Coordinator: Dr Sue Vlack
MEDI7282: Preparation for US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1
Course Coordinator: Dr Christian Gray - med.usmleprep@uq.edu.au
Other course contributors: Dr Sharon Darlington
MEDI7283: Creative Writing for Clinical Excellence
Course Coordinator: TBC
Facilities for Students
Case-Based Learning (CBL) tutorials are conducted in 14 dedicated rooms located on level 4 and level 5 of Building 69 at the St Lucia campus. These tutorials are delivered by a large team of dedicated medically-qualified casual tutors with support from the unit’s academic and professional staff. When not used for scheduled learning activities, these rooms are readily available to students for group study sessions.
To book a CBL rooms outside of scheduled teaching activities, please refer to the Booking with UQ Book It website. Rooms are available to book as follows outside of scheduled teaching activities:
The St Lucia Clinical Unit space on level 4 of Building 69 also has a dedicated student hub area which includes a study lounge and booths, computers, 24-hour usage lockers, a kitchenette, and a large seminar room that is also available for casual study sessions or event bookings.
The opening hours are as follows:
- St Lucia Clinical Unit Enquires Counter: 8.00am to 4:00pm - Monday to Friday
- Student Hub and CBL Rooms: 6.00am to 11.00pm - Monday to Friday
OHS for Students and Staff
Students
All students who attend classes at the St Lucia Clinical Unit are required to complete a local building induction. This induction is held in the first Case Based Learning Tutorial of Semester 1. Please see below a copy of the induction.
St Lucia Clinical Unit Building Induction for Students
Staff
Please see below Building Induction for staff who teach or are located at the St Lucia Clinical Unit. If you require a building induction, please contact us on med.stlucia@uq.edu.au to organise a time.
St Lucia Clinical Unit Building Induction for Staff
2021 MD Program Peer Physical Examination Guidelines
Clinical Skills Practice
To provide opportunities to practice clinical skills, all tutorial rooms in the St Lucia Clinical Unit have an examination table and doctor’s kits are available to borrow from reception.
Clinical refresher workshops are run by the St Lucia Clinical Unit for students seeking to maintain or revise skills during or following a period of program absence, such as an interruption of studies or concurrent completion of a research higher degree. These workshops are run three times per year. Email Belinda Swyny to inquire.
Research, Innovation and Engagement
The St Lucia Clinical Unit is committed to enhancing the quality of teaching in the MD via innovation, collaboration, and scholarly design and evaluation of our programs. We also seek to support students as best as possible throughout their entry to the MD and their transition to latter stages of the program. These efforts are exemplified by the following funded projects and scholarly outputs.
Funding for Projects
- UQ Student Staff Partnership 2019 – Ashlee Forster, Charles Sisk (Y1 MD student), Dileep Mandali (Y2 MD student), Malshi Hathurusinghe (Y3 MD student), Emma Chan (Y4 MD student), Jamie Brown (Y4 MD student), Benjamin Barry, Sharee Stedman, Belinda Swyny, Venkat Reddy, Kirsty Foster. Enhancing student preparedness for major clinical skills examinations within the MD Program.
- UQ Student Staff Partnership 2020 – Iulia Oancea, Nicole Shepherd, Liz Barber, Sue Vlack, Saleem Babri. Collaborative curriculum enhancement – integrating “soft” sciences into the medical curriculum.
- UQ Student Staff Partnership 2020 – Joan Li, Students’ perceptions of the role of assessments in the MD program.
- UQ New Staff Grant 2019 – Pieter Jansen. UQ Healthy Community Program: an interprofessional, community-based learning space for UQ students.
- UQ New Staff Grant 2019 – Ashlee Forster. Online learning activities to augment teaching of clinical examination skills in Phase 1 (pre-clinical years) of the MD Program.
- UQ New Staff Grant 2019 – Megan Steele. Teaching research literacy through experiential learning: Development, implementation and evaluation of a new research project course for medical students.
- UQ Promoting Women Fellowship 2019 – Iulia Oancea
- UQ Promoting Women Fellowship 2020 – Megan Steele
- UQ Funding from the Student Services and Amenities Fee to promote the health or welfare of students 2018 – Benjamin Barry and Craig Engstrom. Supervised Exercise Programs to Enhance the Health and Well-Being of Medical Students: A Cross-Faculty Student Service Program.
- UQ Teaching Innovation Grant 2020 – Benjamin Barry, Peter Lewis, Sharon Darlington, Iulia Oancea, Jacqueline Jauncey-Cooke, Neil Cottrell, Allison Mandrusiak, Chelsea Dobbins, Mark Braunstein, Jim Steel, David Hansen, Clair Sullivan. Building Digital Literacy and interprofessional learning of health professional students by embedding teaching cases in an electronic medical record.
Abstracts, Presentations and Papers
ANZAHPE Conference
Braunstein, Mark, Barry, Benjamin K., Oancea, Iulia, Steel, Jim, Darlington, Sharon and Hansen, David (2019). Building digital literacy of medical students by embedding teaching cases in an electronic medical record. In: ANZAHPE 2019 Conference, Canberra, Australia, (185-185). 1-4 July 2019.
Darlington, Sharon, Oancea, Iulia, Barry, Benjamin K., Shepherd, Nicole, Mukandi, Bryan, Winch, Sarah and Wozniak, Helen (2019). Discriminative capacity of a rubric assessment of ethical reasoning and clinical reasoning in case-based learning tutorials. In: Australian & New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators. ANZAHPE 2019 Conference, Canberra, (). 1-4 July 2019.
Darlington, Sharon, Smith, Tammy and Oancea, Iulia (2019). Medical student attendance at lectures: is there a correlation with performance on assessment?. In: Australian and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators, Canberra, ACT Australia, (). 1-4 July 2019.
Barry, Benjamin K., Shepherd, Nicole, Darlington, Sharon, Mukandi, Bryan, Winch, Sarah, Wozniak, Helen and Oancea, Iulia (2019). Student and tutor evaluations of the integration of medical ethics in case-based learning discussions.. In: ANZAHPE 2019 Conference, Canberra, ACT, Australia, (175-176). 1-4 July 2019.
Simerska, Pavla , Benjamin K. Barry, Oancea, Iulia , Aland, Claire , Midwinter, Mark , Pillai, Suja and Hawkins, Nicholas J. (2019). Does student performance on short answer questions vary from that on single best answer questions?. In: ANZAHPE 2019 Conference, Canberra, ACT, Australia, (216-217). 1-4 July 2019.
Barry, Benjamin K., Simerska, Pavla, Aland, Claire, Midwinter, Mark, Hawkins, Nicholas, Pillai, Suja and Oancea, Iulia (2019). Does the context of an examination influence student performance in anatomy and pathology disciplines for clinical science courses in a medical program?. In: Australian & New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators. ANZAHPE 2019 Conference, Canberra, Australia, (228-229). 1-4 July 2019.
Forster, Ashlee, Stedman, Sharee, Swyny, Belinda, Osborne, Debora and Barry, Benjamin K. (2019). Interprofessional education in Advanced Life Support simulation: assessing team functioning, communication and perceptions of nursing and medical students. In: Australian & New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators. ANZAHPE 2019 Conference, Canberra, (). 1-4 July 2019.
Oancea, Iulia, Barry, Benjamin K., Simerska, Pavla, Aland, Claire, Midwinter, Mark, Pillai, Suja and Hawkins, Nicholas (2019). Is an image worth a thousand words in the medical program exams?. In: ANZAHPE 2019 Conference, Canberra, ACT, Australia, (215-216). 1-4 July 2019.
Barry, Benjamin K., Valenzuela, Trinidad, Li, Sophie H., Casson, Sally M., Cassar, Joanne, Lamanna, Camillo, Lloyd, Andrew R. and Sandler, Carolina X. (2019). Online continuing education for health professionals to improve the management of chronic fatigue syndrome: outcomes of a randomised controlled trial. In: ANZAHPE 2019 Conference, Canberra, ACT Australia, (61-61). 1-4 July 2019.
Forster, Ashlee and Benjamin K. Barry (2019). Online learning activities to augment teaching of clinical skills to medical students in pre-clinical years of the MD Program. In: ANZAHPE 2019 Conference, Canberra, ACT, Australia, (185-186). 1-4 July 2019.
Shepherd, Nicole, Oancea, Iulia, Barry, Bem and Darlington, Sharon (2019). Student perceptions of learning about medical ethics in clinical case-based tutorials. In: Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law, Dunedin, New Zealand, (). 21-23 November 2019.
Darlington, Sharon (2019). The lecture is dead, long live the lecture!. In: Australian & New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators (2019). ANZAHPE 2019 Conference, Canberra, ACT Australia, (). 1-4 July 2019.
Oancea, Iulia, Shepherd, Nicole, Darlington, Sharon, Winch, Sarah and Barry, Ben (2018). Distributed assessment of medical ethics in case discussions facilitated by a large team of casual clinical tutors. In: Sustainability for Health Professions Education. ANZAHPE 2018 Conference, Hobart, TAS, Australia, (). 1-4 July 2018.
Oancea, Iulia, Darlington, Sharon, Ward, Kym and Smith, Tammy (2018). Student engagement with lecture material: is there such a thing as too much flexibility?. In: Sustainability in Health Professions Education. Australian & New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators 2018 Conference, Hobart, Australia, (). 1-4 July 2018.
Darlington, Sharon and Ryan, Cherri (2018). Sustaining Deep Learning: If a CBL model is good for our students should we use it to train our tutors too?. In: Sustainability for Health Professions Education. Australian & New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators 2018 Conference, Hobart, Australia, (). 1-4 July 2018.
Darlington, Sharon, Green, Louise, Smith, Tammy and Oancea, Iulia (2018). Symposium - Case-based Learning: Sustaining deep learning in the increasingly crowded curriculum. In: Sustainability for Health Professions Education. Australian & New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators 2018 Conference, Hobart, TAS Australia, (). 1-4 July, 2018.
Darlington, Sharon, Kelly, Michaela, Sturman, Nancy and McGrath, Dominic (2018). “It could be used for … revenge”: clinician tutors’ initial perceptions of virtual peer observation of teaching. In: Proceedings of the Australian & New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators 2018 Conference. ANZAHPE 2018 Sustainability for Health Professions Education, Hobart, TAS, Australia, (). 1-4 July 2018.
Darlington, Sharon (2017). Not satisfied with just “satisfaction”? Transitioning from measuring staff satisfaction with faculty development to robustly demonstrating its impact. In: Australian and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Education (ANZAHPE) 2017 Conference, Adelaide, SA, Australia, (). 11-14 July 2017.
Kelly, Michaela, Darlington, Sharon, McGrath, Dom and Sturman, Nancy (2017). PIVOTAL experiences: Partnerships in Virtual Observation of Teaching and Learning. In: Australian and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Education (ANZAHPE) 2017 Conference, Adelaide, Australia, (). 11-14 July 2017.
Ryan, Cherri, Chong, Michelle, Clarkson, Janet, Darlington, Sharon, Green, Louise and Smith, Tammy (2017). Transition to Clinical Rotations: A capstone pre-clinical semester. In: Australian and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Education (ANZAHPE) 2017 Conference, Adelaide Convention Centre Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, (). 11-14 July 2017.
Smith, Tammy, Kelleher, Mary, Fraser, James, Clarkson, Janet, Green, Lousie, Fitzgerald, Jenny, Ryan, Cherri, Kelly, Michaela and Darlington, Sharon (2015). Perceptions of the case-based learning model by year 2 MBBS students. In: UQ School of Medicine Learning & Teaching Conference: 2015, Herston, Brisbane, Australia, (). 6 November 2015.
Darlington, S. (2015). Professional Development and Quality Assurance of the Casual Clinician Tutor Workforce: Exploring the Challenges and Developing Solutions. In: Australian and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators, Stakeholder Engagement in Health Professional Education., Newcastle, NSW, Australia, (). 29 – 31 March 2015.
Darlington, Sharon, Ryan, Cherri, Clarkson, Janet and Smith, Tammy (2015). Using CBL to teach CBL. In: The University of Queensland School of Medicine, Learning and Teaching Innovations Conference, Brisbane, Australia, (). 6 November 2015.
Papers in education
Braunstein, Mark, Oancea, Iulia, Barry, Benjamin, Darlington, Sharon, Steel, Jim, Hansen, David, Battock, James, Cheung, Daniel, Gan, Gregory, Hooper, Benjamin, Lundin, Reilly, Nicol, Ducan, O'Brien, Joshua, Whittington, Scott, Willkinson, Chris and Wong, Tse Tse (2019) The development and electronic delivery of case-based learning using a fast healthcare interoperability resource system. JAMIA Open.
Gray, C.P., Burr, S.A. Timing is key to providing modified assessments for students with specific learning difficulties. Perspect Med Educ (2019) doi:10.1007/s40037-019-00553-4
Staff Profiles
Staff of the St Lucia Clinical Unit are variously qualified and experienced in medicine, allied health, nursing, philosophy, biomedical research, public health and education.
Casual Tutoring
The St Lucia Clinical Unit employs over 100 casual tutors to facilitate small group teaching during year 1 and 2 of the MD. This teaching occurs at St Lucia Clinical Unit, Royal Brisbane Clinical Unit, PA-Southside and Mater, as well as the Francis Baron Burnett Simulation Centre at Greenslopes Hospital and the Clinical Skills Development Centre at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital campus.
Interested in casual tutoring? Complete the survey and upload your CV at this link to register your interest.
In addition to training provided by the St Lucia Clinical Unit, tutors are able to participate in UQ teacher training schemes and may also become involved in project work to develop teaching materials. There are also annual teaching awards for tutors in the MD.
Student staff liaison
Interaction between students and staff is valued highly in the MD program and our unit. These important interactions are facilitated via faculty committees, partnership projects and local unit meetings.
In response to student feedback we have improved the amenity of the St Lucia Clinical Unit, such as increasing the access hours for the student hub and CBL rooms, providing equipment in each CBL room to facilitate independent practice of clinical skills, and made tea, coffee and milk available in the student hub.
If you have suggestions or concerns about the St Lucia Clinical Unit space or courses or other matters, then please raise these by email or scheduling an appointment with the Team Leader - Amarjeet Kaur (med.stluciatl@uq.edu.au) or Head of Clinical Unit - Dr Ben Barry (b.barry@uq.edu.au). You can also convey any suggestions or concerns to your year representatives who meet with the SLCU team or in the unit feedback box in the student hub. We look forward to hearing from you.
Contact
Head of St Lucia Clinical Unit
Dr Ben Barry
Phone: +61 7 344 31408
Email: b.barry@uq.edu.au
Address: Level 4, Building 69, St Lucia.
Mrs Amarjeet Kaur
Phone: +61 7 344 32047
Email (students): med.stluciastudents@uq.edu.au