Medicine (MD)
Get hands-on, interprofessional experience starting in your first year.
Why choose this program?
With campuses in Halifax, N.S. and Saint John, N.B., and teaching sites across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, Dalhousie Medical School provides the highest calibre medical education to aspiring doctors and medical researchers in the Maritime region.
Our curriculum balances classroom work with clinical and elective opportunities in rural clinics and in large, tertiary-care hospitals to help you become a caring, resourceful physician who is able to work with patients, families, and colleagues to provide excellent care in many different contexts and in complex and uncertain situations. You'll also be encouraged to be an agent of creative change in health-care institutions and in communities and provide outstanding patient-centred care.
You'll have many opportunities to get real-life hospital experience early on, through the clinical skills components or by choosing an elective that offers additional hands-on learning.
The program is divided into three key sections, Med 1 and Med 2, followed by clerkship. The first two years, Med 1 and Med 2, give you a basic foundation in medicine, including the anatomy and systems of the human body, while considering other important aspects of health care, from the philosophical and ethical to the practical.
Clerkship, consisting of two phases completed over two academic years (Med 3 and Med 4), gives you even more opportunity to apply your learning in a range of situations and fields. Four periods of teaching time (each 2 to 4 weeks in length) will be developed to help students transition from Med 2 to Med 3, and through the clerkship from Med 3 to Med 4, and subsequently, from Med 4 into residency. These sessions will incorporate Introduction to Clerkship and Critical Review and Mastery (CRAM).
The Research in Medicine (RIM) Program is designed for all medical students and is meant to develop skills of critical thinking and creativity through a mentored research project conducted longitudinally throughout the four-year curriculum. During the first term of Med 1, courses will expose all students to essential research skills. Completion of this program, including presentation of research findings, will take place in the spring of the fourth year and is a requirement for graduation.
Careers
Dalhousie Medical School has post-graduate (resident) training in family medicine and more than 45 Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons specialty and subspecialty programs. But don't worry, you'll have access to career-planning programs and services to help make important career decisions easier. You might choose to specialize in:
anesthesia
emergency medicine
family medicine
pathology
surgery
After completing your residency training, there are plenty of opportunities for continuing professional development and graduate studies through Dalhousie Medical School including a medical research program designed to build a career as a clinician scientist.
Admission requirements
You'll need to meet the Faculty of Graduate Studies minimum requirements as well as any program-specific admissions requirements before you can apply.
Financial information
At Dalhousie, we want our students to focus on their studies, rather than worry about their personal finances. We offer competitive tuition rates and funding programs to support graduate students in almost all of our degree programs.
Program options
Course-based: Classes in our medical program do not have the typical academic structure; rather, you will take a variety of theme- and case-based units that focus on a particular area of medical training.
Practicum: Through clerkship and elective opportunities, you’ll gain the practical experience required to prepare you for a career as a physician.
All graduate programs at Dalhousie are collaboratively delivered by a home Faculty and the Faculty of Graduate Studies.
