Teaching anatomy in Sri Lanka: past, present and future

Abstract

Sri Lanka is expanding its wings on allopathic medical education by commencing the academic activities of a novel medical faculty at the University of Moratuwa in the current year (1). Each medical faculty in Sri Lanka is attached to a state university, which is governed by the university grants commission (UGC) of Sri Lanka. Anatomy is an integral component of allopathic medical education which forms the basis for competent and safe medical practice. All -except one -medical faculties have a dedicated department to teach anatomy to undergraduate medical students. A shortage of anatomy teachers and an overall reduction in teaching hours, are two important concerns that may impair the quality of anatomy education. Time devoted to teaching human anatomy has experienced a considerable reduction in the medical curriculum for undergraduate medical students (2, 3). In fact, a recent curricular revision of one of the medical faculties in Sri Lanka resulted in 25.5% reduction in the time spent in the anatomy curriculum (4). However, development of a national core curriculum would overcome this issue by recommending minimum student contact hours for anatomical study.Shortage of qualified academic staff to teach anatomy, on a full time basis, for undergraduate medical students is a global apprehension to contemporary medical education, and Sri Lanka is likely not an exception. A web -based short review on the anatomy department of the earliest ten medical faculties in Sri Lanka revealed that about 50% of them had only four or less teaching staff (Senior Professor, Professor, Associate Professor, Senior Lecturer, Lecturer, and Probationary Lecturer) in the department (5-14). However, nineteen teachers in the anatomy departments had obtained their doctorates in the relevant field and each institutionexcept twohad at least one teaching staff with a doctoral degree.In the absence of any regulations that stipulate the teacher to student ratio for medical faculties in the country, the prescribed norms of the UGC for the allocation of Cadre of teaching staff (Senior Professor / Professor [Chair], Senior Professor, Professor, Associate Professor, Senior Lecturer, Lecturer [Grade I, and II], and Probationary Lecturer) could be considered as the national standard where one teacher is assigned per seven undergraduate medical students (15).According to the recently published statistics of UGC pertaining to the year 2019, the teacher: student ratio observed for allopathic