Surgical Clinical Correlates in Anatomy: Design and implementation of a first‐year medical school program

Abstract

Medical students state the need for a clinically oriented anatomy class so to maximize their learning experience. We hypothesize that the first-year medical students, who take the Surgical Clinical Correlates in Anatomy program, will perform better than their peers in their anatomy course, their surgical clerkships and ultimately choose surgical residencies. We designed and recently implemented this program for first-year medical students. It consisted of General Surgical Knowledge, Orthopedic Surgery, Plastic Surgery, Urology, Cardiothoracic Surgery, General Surgery, Vascular Surgery, and Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) sessions. Each session had defined learning objectives and interactive cadaveric operations performed by faculty members and students. The program was elective and had 25 participants randomly chosen. An evaluative questionnaire was completed before and after the program. Comparative analysis of the questionnaires, first-year anatomy examination results, clinical surgical rotation scores, and residency match results will be completed. The positive opinions of surgeons increased for all medical students from the pre-evaluation to the post-evaluation, and there was a greater increase in positive opinions for our participants. Our participants also had the highest average overall for all combined anatomy examinations. A need exists among medical students to develop a clinically correlated anatomy program that will maximize their learning experience, improve their performance and allow them to make moreinformed career choices. The recent implementation of this Surgical Clinical Correlates in Anatomy program fulfills this need.

Design, implementation, and evaluation of an innovative anatomy course

“…A similar use of clinical procedures was piloted as a supplement to an anatomy course (Haubert et al, 2009). Their survey instrument revealed that students liked the supplement, but those who participated did no bet- Postclerkship examination of long-term effectiveness: subscores categorized by region.…”

“…These challenges have been faced with varying success by a number of medical schools that experimented with the design of their anatomy course . One general approach has been to use the radiographic, medical, and surgical applications of anatomy to guide the structure and content of the course (McLachlan et al, 2004;Drake, 2007;Haubert et al, 2009). Examination of the efficacy of these approaches has been limited to preliminary studies.…”

Surgeons as medical school educators: An untapped resource

“…Then, the attending surgeons led students through related operative procedures on cadavers. The topics or specialties covered over the eight sessions included: cardiothoracic surgery, plastic surgery, general surgical knowledge, urology, general surgery, orthopedic surgery, vascular surgery, and ENT (Haubert et al, 2009). During these sessions, the students could perform surgery on the cadavers with the guidance of the surgeon.…”

Cadaver Dissection Is Obsolete in Medical Training! A Misinterpreted Notion

“…Medical schools in Australia, New Zealand, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia have also started CD as a voluntary activity [62-64]. Ohio State University in the USA has implemented elective programs with interactive CD for medical students in different surgical specialties [65]. Charles University in Prague, Czech Re­public, uses cadavers for teaching practical endoscopic methods to undergraduate and postgraduate students [66].…”