Background: The advent of the scholarly project provides an opportunity to collaborate with registrars to build research capacity. Trainees in the 2012 program are required to complete a scholarly project to meet training requirements. As such, clinical academics can partner with registrars to design and provide supervision for discrete and achievable research projects. Medical students are increasingly realizing the training advantages associated with being involved with research while in medical school and are enthusiastic about volunteering for research experiences.

Objectives: To outline the mutual advantages of research partnerships between clinical academics, trainees and medical students.

Methods: We will outline partnership projects between clinical academics, trainees and medical students and describe how to build a suitable discrete and achievable project. We will also describe the mutual obligations of supervision.

Findings: In the past 2 years at the Metro South Addiction and Mental Health Service in Brisbane, we have supervised six medical students and seven trainees to project completion and in 2018 have 16 registrars and eight medical students working on active projects. These projects include systematic reviews, meta-analyses, clinical trial protocols, retrospective de-identified administrative data set analysis and clinical chart reviews.

Conclusions: Supervising trainees and medical students can be a mutually beneficial undertaking within the public sector.