Evidence relating to the effect on medical learning by students not exposed to cadavers is scant, and plainly opportunities will now arise through our programme to gather such evidence. We anticipate that this discussion paper will contribute to an ongoing debate, in which virtually all previous papers on this topic have concluded that use of cadavers is essential to medical learning.

In the context of doctor shortages and mal-distributions in many Western countries, prestige and lifestyle friendliness have emerged as significant factors for medical students when they choose a medical specialty. In this study, we surveyed two samples of Australian medical students and had them rank 19 medical specialties for prestige (N = 530) and lifestyle friendliness (N = 644). The prestige rankings were generally consistent with previous ratings by physicians, lay people and advanced medical students, with surgery, internal, and intensive care medicine ranking the highest, and public health, occupational, and non-specialist hospital medicine ranking lowest. This suggests that medical students have incorporated prevailing prestige perceptions of practicing doctors and the community. Lifestyle rankings were markedly different from prestige rankings, where dermatology, general practice, and public health medicine were ranked the most lifestyle friendly, and surgery, obstetrics/gynaecology and intensive care were ranked least friendly. Student lifestyle rankings differed from physician and author-generated rankings, indicating that student preferences should be considered rather than relying on ratings created by others. Few differences were found for gender or year of study, signifying perceptions of prestige and lifestyle friendliness were consistent across the students sampled. Having access to and understanding these rankings will assist career counsellors to aid student and junior doctor decision-making and aid workforce planners to address gaps in medical specialty health services.

We concluded that norm referencing is preferable to criterion referencing, negative marking preferable to number-right marking, a discontinuous scale preferable to a continuous scale and that grades should be weighted to favour the most recent outcomes, although there should still be a degree of persistence (earlier grades should not disappear all together). Grade boundaries should be established with regard to rules on remediation and progression.

We surveyed 355 junior doctors (first four years of post-university training; 69% female, mean age = 28 years) from multiple hospital and practice locations, and used an online questionnaire to assess their training-related demands (academic stress, concern about training debt, hours worked), academic burnout, and personal resources (operationalized as career calling). We tested whether training-related demands were associated with academic burnout and whether career calling moderated the association between the demands and burnout. The demands accounted for approximately one third of the variance in burnout, with all accounting for significant, unique variance. In the context of the demands, career calling was not a significant predictor, but it moderated the association between academic stress and burnout. The study identified additional ways that junior doctors can be assisted to manage these first few years of medical training after graduating from medical school.