Geneva road map for clinical anatomy teaching

Dear Editor, I was very interested to read the recent paper by Smith et al. (2016), entitled ‘The Anatomical Society core regional anatomy syllabus for undergraduate medicine’. The question of what needs to be taught to medical students will obviously become an increasingly urgent and inevitable subject, and in an era where the time allocated to teaching gross anatomy has been drastically curtailed worldwide, an answer is imperative. Against this background, please allow me to draw the authors’ and readers’ attention to an approach that I would take the liberty to call complementary to that proposed. It was published by Fasel et al. (2014) and co-authored by a primary care physician, a surgeon, and an anatomist. The design of the study was a modified Delphi consensus approach, and, as a conclusion, it proposed a three-tiered strategy (the ‘Geneva road map for clinical anatomy teaching’), as follows: (i) undergraduate phase 1 (Bachelor), where teaching is devoted to the common core subjects relevant to general medical practice; (ii) undergraduate phase 2 (Master), in which selected students deepen their knowledge and skills depending on their intended clinical specialty; and (iii) the level of postgraduate and continuing education, at which state-of-the-art anatomy for higher surgical and radiological examinations is acquired. This curriculum has been implemented in our Institution since 1995. I suggest that this concept could serve as a valuable complement to the topographical approach proposed by Smith et al. (2016), particularly for systematic anatomy instruction at the Bachelor phase