Background: This article summarizes a global study of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on junior health professions students' outlook on medicine. The pandemic has significantly affected health professions education. There is limited understanding of how students' pandemic experiences will affect them, and what impact these events may have on their career paths or the future of the professions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHistorically, Anatomy education is an in-person discipline involving exposure to human body donors that facilitates personal and professional growth through, in part, the initiation of reflection on the topic of death. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic the decreased exposure to cadaveric anatomy for many health professions students may have influenced the depth of their individual reflections on this topic. Accordingly, this study aimed to investigate the effect of an alternate approach-focus group discussions between peers with varying degrees of exposure to cadaveric material-that may offer one strategy to stimulate deep reflection on the topic of death.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: During the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person cadaveric dissection laboratories for teaching anatomy were omitted by many schools around the world. While knowledge domains can be easily evaluated via remote exams, non-traditional discipline-independent skills such as those encouraged through reflection on the topic of death are often overlooked. This study investigated how different anatomy course formats played a role in initiating students' reflections on death during the COVID-19 pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Student outbound mobility is a major element in internationalization of medical education and global health education. However, this approach is often criticized, as it is inherently inequitable. Internationalization is a newer concept that aims to provide students with international skills and experiences without exchange travel.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Medical and dental students' feelings and thoughts about the topic of death and life's passing are often associated with learning in the gross anatomy course, when students begin working with a deceased body donor in order to study human anatomy. Little is known of whether the format of anatomy teaching has an impact on these experiences. An observational study was performed to capture the initiation of students' sentiments on the topic of life's passing during the anatomy course at 14 international universities, identify common themes regarding these thoughts, and to study the connection to variations in anatomy course formats and included elements.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study conveys preclinical healthcare professions students' sentiments at 14 universities during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Essays about students' thoughts and experiences were thematically sorted and revealed a variety of sentiments spanning from positive (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnatomical examinations have been designed to assess topographical and/or applied knowledge of anatomy with or without the inclusion of visual resources such as cadaveric specimens or images, radiological images, and/or clinical photographs. Multimedia learning theories have advanced the understanding of how words and images are processed during learning. However, the evidence of the impact of including anatomical and radiological images within written assessments is sparse.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: At a time of global interconnectedness, the internationalization of medical education has become important. Anatomy as an academic discipline, with its close connections to the basic sciences and to medical education, can easily be connected with global health and internationalization of medical education. Here the authors present an international program based on a partnership between twelve anatomy departments in ten countries, on four continents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe caudate lobe of the liver has portal blood supply and hepatic vein drainage independent of the remainder of the liver and may be differentially affected in liver pathologies. Ultrasonographic measurement of the caudate lobe can be used to generate hepatic indices that may indicate cirrhosis. This study investigated the relationship of metrics of the caudate lobe and other morphological features of human livers from a northwest Indian Punjabi population (n = 50) and a UK Caucasian population (n = 25), which may affect the calculation of hepatic indices.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe objective structural practical examination (OSPE) is a timed examination that assesses topographical and/or applied knowledge of anatomy with the use of cadaveric resources and medical images. This study investigated whether elements of question design (provision of clinical context, type of visual resources used, gender context, and difficulty) of an anatomy question affected students' performance and also whether there was any effect of basic demography or participation in various voluntary activities. Study participants were second-year medical students (n = 150), 83 of whom consented to fill in a questionnaire collecting demographics, revision preferences, and assessment preferences.
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