After intense public debate and a committee of inquiry lasting eight months, the announcement that the Australian National University (ANU) was to develop Australia's 12th and the world's 896th medical school was made in April 2001 by representatives of the Commonwealth and Australian Capital Territory governments and the Vice Chancellor of the ANU.

This event represented the culmination of a process that has evolved over several decades. In the early 1970s the ANU narrowly missed out on a medical school, which went to the University of Newcastle. The 1980s had seen an involvement in the teaching of a small cohort of final-year students from the University of Queensland in Canberra, and in 1993 the University of Sydney began to develop its Canberra Clinical School.1 The Clinical School was successful, especially in its teaching programs, as judged by student satisfaction and assessment scores. This positive experience formed a sound platform on which to develop a fully fledged medical school.

But why Canberra? The Commonwealth and some State governments have a track record of supporting the development of medical schools in regional Australia. The medical schools at the University of Tasmania, the University of Newcastle and James Cook University (Qld) are notable examples. Canberra, as well as being the national capital, has grown in recent decades to be an important regional service centre, particularly in the provision of health and education for south-east New South Wales; indeed, the "hole in the doughnut" is a popular colloquial description of the situation, evident on studying a map of the region. In spite of the ACT jurisdictional boundary, Canberra has close links with its surrounding area, which, incidentally, despite appearances to the contrary, includes a number of areas with some of the poorest social indicators in NSW.2 Placing a new medical school in this region, centred on the resource of ANU and building on the already established Canberra Clinical School, will help meet a regional need and will allow the new medical school to meet one aspect of its founding mission: to be rural and community focused.

The ANU Medical School (ANUMS) will have links with the ACT Department of Health and Community Care and the Southern Area Health Service of the NSW Health system. Canberra, the "bush capital", is very close to the small population centres of south-eastern NSW. The School intends to take advantage of the diversity of the surrounding area and provide rural experience from very early in the course. For example, we plan a one-day-a-week clinical experience from the first week of the course. We will be able to use close rural locations such as Yass, Queanbeyan, Goulburn and Cooma, all of which are within an hour's travelling distance of Canberra. We plan to give selected students the opportunity to spend one of their clinical years in a rural setting, learning medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology synchronously while their urban colleagues rotate through traditional blocs.

The School will provide a four-year graduate medical program with a thematic structure and a problem-based learning approach. Resources will dictate that our adherence to the problem-based approach will be less during the clinical years than is the case in the University of Sydney's graduate program. However, we intend to push the bounds of certain elements of this type of curriculum further. Taking full advantage of the ANU faculty, the students will have an understanding of international health and the impacts of globalisation, as well as a strong commitment to multiculturalism. At first sight this may seem at odds with a rural and community focus, but the need to develop rural and community medical programs and teaching experiences is indeed global. ANUMS sees itself evolving as a "type A" medical school — one that "prepares its graduates to properly practise in a health system — which it would have contributed to designing — to best serve the priority health needs of society".3

In planning the course in Canberra we intend to avail ourselves of the opportunities afforded by its status as the national capital. Thus, we will approach a number of Commonwealth departments and agencies (eg, the Department of Health and Ageing, Department of Defence, Therapeutic Goods Administration and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare) to provide input into course planning and teaching.

The ANU and the University of Canberra have an understanding to collaborate. This is most likely to occur during the clinical years, when we intend to introduce team training of medical students and other health science students in competency-based clinical skills training. At this stage of the course we intend to introduce combined teaching of medical students from the ANU with other health science students from the University of Canberra. Training together will prepare students for the teamwork of professional life. In this way, the School will have a focus on quality and safety, which are important issues in medicine in Australia in the early 21st century.4 We see this as part of restating the role of medicine as a profession, with a particular emphasis on the obligations that that entails.5 Drawing on the ANU's existing strengths, human rights will become a major focal point of our ethics program.

The School faces a challenge in developing a research profile within the ANU, whose medical research organisations (eg, the John Curtin School of Medical Research) are already well established. We will endeavour to complement what already exists and concentrate on community-based and translational research, particularly at the Canberra Hospital. We have agreed from the outset to foster research in our rural clinical school.

The long gestation of ANUMS did not lessen the controversy of its birth. We will add 60 places, including 25 rural bonded places, to the medical student population of Australia. ANUMS will be innovative, different and will complement other medical programs, contributing to the rich diversity of medical education that already exists in Australia.6