Survey of Gross Anatomy Education in China: The Past and the Present

Abstract

Medical education in mainland China has undergone massive expansion and reforms in the past decades. A nation-wide survey of the five-year clinical medicine programs aimed to examine the course hours, pedagogies, learning resources and teaching staff of anatomy both at present and over the past three decades (The directors or senior teachers from 90 out of the 130 five-year clinical medicine programs were invited to fill out a factual questionnaire by email. Ultimately, sixty-five completed questionnaires were received from 65 different schools. It was found that the total number of gross anatomy course hours has decreased by 11% in the past 30 years and that systematic and regional anatomy have been increasingly taught separately among the surveyed medical schools. Problem-based learning has been adopted in thirty-five (54%) of the surveyed schools, and team-based learning is used in ten (15%) of the surveyed schools. The surveyed schools reported receiving more donated cadavers in recent years, with the average number increasing from 20.67 ± . However, this has not resulted in a decrease in the number of students who needed to share one cadaver (11.85 ± 5.03 in 1990-1999 to 14.22 ± 5.0 in 2010-2018). A decreasing trend regarding the teacher-student ratio (1:25

Gross Anatomy Education in China during the Covid‐19 Pandemic: A National Survey

“…Systematic anatomy is offered to medical students in China during the first or second semesters, and regional anatomy is typically taught during the third to fifth semesters. A nationwide survey of gross anatomy instruction in five‐year clinical medicine programs was performed in 2018 (Pan et al, 2020), but online education was not included in that survey, although it had become increasingly popular.…”

Going Virtual to Support Anatomy Education: A STOPGAP in the Midst of the Covid‐19 Pandemic

“…Anatomy has, perhaps, a unique challenge in moving to online delivery. Large numbers of anatomy programs use a range of face‐to‐face physical‐based activities (Heylings, 2002; Craig et al, 2010; McBride and Drake, 2018; Pan et al, 2020; Rockarts et al, 2020) that are not so easy to adapt into a session delivered using technologies such as Microsoft Teams ® , Blackboard Collaborate, Panopto, or Zoom. These include cadaveric dissection sessions, living/surface anatomy, and clinically focused sessions using hands‐on equipment such as ultrasound.…”

Mexican Educators Survey on Anatomical Sciences Education and a Review of World Tendencies

“…The questionnaire was developed to obtain data similar to already published reports from different countries (Drake et al, 2002; Craig et al, 2010; McBride and Drake, 2018; Pan et al, 2020; Rockarts et al, 2020). The questionnaire was validated through a Delphi method by department heads from different sciences and expert educators.…”

“…The most common laboratory activities in gross anatomy in Mexico were dissection (67.6%), the use of imaging studies (64.8%), anatomical drawings (50.7%), and clinical cases (49.3%). Pan et al reported a reduction in dissection time of 71% from 2000-2009 to 2010-2018 for students in 92% of the schools surveyed in China, despite the increase in body donations over this period (Pan et al, 2020). Dissection remained the main form of laboratory activities in gross anatomy in the United States (McBride and Drake, 2018) and in the United Kingdom (Gogalniceanu et al, 2009), the latter with a 77% student-led dissection.…”