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The Use of a Checklist to Increase the Quality of Student Dissections in Medical Gross Anatomy Labs
Author(s) -
Johnson Eric,
Foster James
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.30.1_supplement.783.3
Subject(s) - checklist , gross anatomy , dissection (medical) , medical education , quality (philosophy) , medicine , medical physics , psychology , surgery , anatomy , philosophy , epistemology , cognitive psychology
Medical students will often neglect the quality of cadaveric dissection in order to leave the Gross Anatomy lab early to pursue other activities. The resulting incomplete dissections contain significant amounts of connective tissue and skin which obscures visualization and identification of anatomical structures. To address this issue, the faculty at the Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine (ACOM) developed a system to improve the quality of student dissections. To this end, we created a checklist that gives the anatomy faculty and fellows guidelines to assess the quality of each dissection. Each dissection group is checked off at the end of the lab and the students are required to remedy any deficiencies in the dissection that are noted in the checklist before the beginning of the next lab period. The students maintain a continuous lab report and points contributing to their grade in the course are given for the level of quality of each completed dissection as determined from the checklist. Since we began utilizing the checklists, the quality of the dissections has noticeably improved. We believe that one reason for the improvement is that the checklists provide a well‐defined endpoint that the students must reach. The checklists also allow the faculty and fellows to describe deficiencies in the dissection to help the students improve their dissection abilities and give a higher understanding of anatomical relationships.