Mastering Anatomical Techniques: Enhancing anatomical skills

Abstract

As medical schools attempt to find time in their curriculum to cover more content, they have sought to develop new methods of teaching gross anatomy. The amount of time spent studying gross anatomy has declined amidst controversy as to how and when teaching is best delivered. Moreover, previous studies have established that medical student interest in surgery has declined, along with their technical skills in anatomy. This loss of interest is due to several factors, such as the male‐dominance present in the field, the difficulty of obtaining high enough grades, and nationality. For this reason, the Anatomy Department of the Universidad Central del Caribe School of Medicine at Puerto Rico (UCC) decided to create a pilot project aimed at second‐ and third‐year medical students with surgical interest, providing them with an integrated apprenticeship and an opportunity to mentor first‐year students during their Human Gross and Developmental Anatomy (HGDA) course. Their responsibilities include preparing for dissection, instructing students during dissection on weekends, and tutoring to emphasize anatomical concepts. This provides students with a variety of learning opportunities and a set of skills that we believe are necessary to pursue a career in the surgical field. To evaluate the viability of this pilot project, we carried out a comparison of the scores obtained by first‐year medical students during the first block examination on the musculoskeletal system in 2017 and 2018. The academic performance of first‐year medical students in 2018 served as the experimental variable, while that of students in 2017 served as the control, since they did not receive any help during their first year. In addition to this, a survey addressing satisfaction was also developed for this first phase of the study. The latter was sent to all 74 first year medical students at UCC. The survey included a 5‐point questionnaire using a Likert scale response ranking. Preliminary positive results were obtained for both the academic performance comparison and the survey. These results represent an exciting opportunity for the development of innovative approaches for teaching and learning anatomy that transform the traditional didactic methods towards more engaging and stimulating methods of learning. The analysis of academic performance regarding the remaining three examination blocks (thorax, abdominopelvic cavity, and head and neck) are pending and will take place as the course progresses. Nevertheless, findings for this first phase of the project support our hypothesis that second‐ and third‐year medical students are a viable educational resource promoting professionalism, critical thinking, and instructions.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.