Master of Surgical Research

Course overview

This course of study leads to a Masters by Research degree, with the students drawn from qualified medical practitioners, surgeons in training and fellowship-trained surgeons. The program has a primary function in providing doctors with a structured training and experience in independent research, specifically in the surgical speciality. It also fulfils a secondary function in providing discipline-specific training for doctors with aspirations in surgery, and provides an option for students to gain some skills in clinical leadership, for future leadership roles in surgery and broader medicine. Research training and clinical leadership training will be carried out at the Waurn Ponds campus, with heavy utilisation of online resources to support the teaching. Research activity, although coordinated from the Waurn Ponds campus, will mainly be carried out at the student’s place of work, although the School of Medicine’s Anatomy Laboratory will also be utilised where the Clinical Anatomy Investigation project involves cadaveric inspection or dissection. Primary supervision will be shared by academics within the School and other experts local to the workplace.

Through completion of the Master of Surgical Research it is expected that medical graduates, surgeons in training and qualified surgeons will:

• gain an understanding of research techniques relevant to surgery;
• produce high quality written work, suitable for publication in scientific journals, and present this orally to a high standard;
• gain the skills needed to critically evaluate their own, and therefore other’s, work;
• demonstrate their ability to apply research techniques in surgery and to lead research work; and
• develop, or consolidate, an advanced knowledge of human anatomy, as relevant to their discipline