Build real clinical skills at home, before your first clinical placement.

The Foundation Medical Course turns theory into things your hands can actually do. Across more than 50 practical projects you can do at home, you practise the core skills a clinical program expects you to walk in with: hand hygiene, taking vitals, examining a patient, and reading a urinalysis. It’s paired with The Apprentice Doctor® Medical Foundation Simulation Kit, which includes the instruments and items you need.

What you’ll be able to do

• Hand hygiene, gloving, and the basics of sterile technique
• Take a full set of vitals: heart rate, temperature, respiratory rate, and blood pressure
• Examine the eye, ear, skin, mouth, and abdomen
• Elicit the patellar, Babinski, and pupil-light reflexes
• Tell normal from abnormal heart, lung, joint, and gastrointestinal sounds
• Perform and interpret a urinalysis and pulse oximetry
• Take a thorough medical history

What’s inside the course

1. Introduction

Medical ethics, sterility and aseptic technique, hand hygiene, gloving, and theatre attire, including scrubbing and gowning for surgery.

2. The basics of a medical examination

The science of sound and light and how it applies to the body, examining the ear and the eye (including the Snellen test), using a stethoscope and sphygmomanometer, taking a medical history, and the systematic physical examination by inspection and percussion.

3. The body systems

A working tour of all eleven body systems, from the integumentary to the reproductive, each paired with a hands-on examination: skin, nails, and hair; joint and heart sounds; reflexes; vital signs; lymph nodes; respiratory sounds; the abdomen; urinalysis; and more.

4. Diseases fact file

How diagnosis works: the signs of inflammation, examining a swelling, water and electrolyte balance, dehydration and edema, emergency medicine and trauma, burns, and a range of infectious and metabolic diseases.

5. Careers and assessment

A look at the careers across medicine and healthcare, and a final assessment.

Who should enroll

Built for nursing and medical assistant students who want to be confident with the practical basics before clinicals. It fits just as well for anyone heading into allied health and the medical sciences: pre-med and medical students, paramedics, military medics, and high schoolers serious about a career in healthcare.

Setting

Online and self-paced.

Duration

About 60 hours, including the practical projects.

We recommend you don’t rush it. Keep to about three hours a day so each topic has time to settle. With full-time study you could finish in under a week, but spacing it out works better for what you actually remember. Before each session, take a few minutes to review the previous day’s work.

Requirements and instructions

— Register with Apprentice Doctor Academy

— Enroll in the course

— Get the Simulation Kit (optional, but you’ll need it to complete the practical projects and practice the techniques you learn)

Certified credits

Counts as the equivalent of sixty shadowing hours.

One half academic credit per 80 hours of courses taken. Transcript available upon request.

Warnings

– The Apprentice Doctor® Foundation Course and its Simulation Kit (every item and instrument in the kit) are for education and training only. No instrument or item may be used in a real clinical setting, emergency or otherwise.

– Without a formal medical qualification, using these techniques on the public can expose you to medico-legal action.

– The surgical gloves contain latex. Latex-free gloves are available on request.

– The course and kit suit nursing, medical assistant, and serious high school students. Adult supervision is recommended for students under 18.

Click here to order your Apprentice Doctor® “For Future Doctors” Simulation Kit