Assessing Anatomy Education: A Perspective from Design

Abstract

Medical and healthcare practice is likely to see fundamental changes in the future that will require a different approach to the way in which we educate, train, and assess the next generation of healthcare professionals. The anatomical sciences will need to be part of that challenge so they continue to play a full role in preparing students with the knowledge and ever increasingly the skills and competencies that will contribute to the fundamentals of their future capacity to practice effectively. Although there have been significant advances in anatomical science pedagogy, by reviewing learning and assessment in an apparently unrelated field, provides an opportunity to bring a different perspective and enable appropriate challenge of the current approaches in anatomy. Design learning has had to continually reimagine itself in response to the shifting landscape in design practice and the threats associated with technology and societal change. Design learning has also long used a student‐centric active pedagogy and allied authentic assessment methods and, therefore, provides an ideal case study to help inform future changes required in anatomical learning and assessment.

One year of anatomy teaching and learning in the outbreak: Has the Covid‐19 pandemic marked the end of a century‐old practice? A systematic review

“…Dissection led the students match knowledge with practice and patient care at an earlier stage of their career (Evans et al, 2018; Evans & Pawlina, 2020). Furthermore, the use of embalmed bodies in anatomical education provides students with situation awareness, decision making, communication, teamwork, leadership, managing stress and coping with fatigue that are crucial complement to healthcare professionals' technical skills and are required to ensure the delivery of safe and effective medical care (Fletcher et al, 2004; Yule et al, 2006; Flin et al, 2008; Pearson & McLafferty, 2011; Brunckhors et al, 2017; Evans et al, 2018; Evans & Pawlina, 2020; McDaniel et al, 2021; Roxburgh & Evans, 2021). Therefore, body donation is a noble, generous and crucial act in the interest of safe clinical and surgical practice (McHanwell et al, 2008; Riederer et al, 2012; Riederer, 2016; Salameh et al, 2020).…”

“…As the “first patient” for clinicians in training, cadavers represent a crucial tool in teaching and research: many universities have dissection facilities and body donation programs and institutions usually use cadavers in the preclinical development of surgical instruments and procedures (Memon, 2018; Wilson et al, 2018; James et al, 2019). Dissection in anatomical education is much more than a helpful tool in learning the structure of tissues and organs: recent evidence demonstrated that the environment where anatomical knowledge is acquired, could help improving humanistic skills (nontraditional discipline‐independent skills or NTDIS) (Cooper et al, 2010; Smith et al, 2015; Brunckhorst et al, 2017; Evans et al, 2018; Scrooby et al, 2019; Evans & Pawlina, 2020; Lachman & Pawlina, 2020; Evans, 2021; Roxburgh & Evans, 2021). Dissection led the students match knowledge with practice and patient care at an earlier stage of their career (Evans et al, 2018; Evans & Pawlina, 2020).…”

Musculoskeletal anatomy knowledge in Australian chiropractors

“…The results of this study suggest that Australian chiropractors, in contrast to other healthcare graduates, maintain their knowledge in the subdiscipline of anatomy, specifically gross anatomy, adequate for safe clinical practice. This evidence will be useful in light of future fundamental changes to anatomy education expected due to changes in healthcare practice (Roxburgh and Evans, 2021) and the Covid-19 pandemic (Evans and Pawlina, 2021) in training future chiropractors.…”

The future of anatomy education: Learning from Covid‐19 disruption

“…Technology has also started to disrupt the way in which students are assessed with interactive e‐assessments being increasingly utilized (Elzainy et al, 2020; Chakrabarti, 2020; Bogomolova et al, 2021). In recent years, there has also been a fundamental recognition that anatomy education needs to be redesigned to play a greater role in preparing learners for practice by helping them to develop a new range of skills and attributes (Roxburgh & Evans, 2021). This includes the explicit incorporation of nontraditional discipline‐independent skills (NTDIS) (Evans et al, 2018; Evans & Pawlina, 2020; Lachman & Pawlina, 2020) and professional identity formation (PIF) (Pawlina, 2019; Abrams et al, 2021; Darici et al, 2022) into many anatomy courses with an emphasis on communication (Evans, 2013; Lochner et al, 2020; Yohannan et al, 2022), teamwork (Vasan et al, 2009, 2011; Huitt et al, 2015), critical reasoning (Elizondo‐Omaña et al, 2010; Kassirer, 2010; Rajprasath et al, 2020), interprofessional learning (Smith et al, 2015; Zheng et al, 2019; Lochner et al, 2020), and professionalism (Pawlina et al, 2006; Palmer et al, 2020; Khabaz Mafinejad et al, 2021).…”