Collaborative development of anatomy workshops for medical and dental students in Cambodia

After Phnom Penh was liberated from the Khmer Rouge in 1979, health science education in Cambodia had to be completely rebuilt. In this article, the authors report the results of a teaching collaboration between the University of Melbourne (Australia), the International University (Cambodia), and the University of Health Sciences (Cambodia). The main objectives in this collaboration were to provide the opportunity for dental and medical students in Cambodia to attend resourced anatomy workshops and to provide an opportunity for anatomy teachers in Cambodia to gain experience in implementing anatomy workshops of the style that are routinely used in the medical and dental curricula at the University of Melbourne. Experienced anatomy educators from the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of Melbourne, designed and resourced a series of workshops and then delivered these in collaboration with Cambodian teaching staff in Phnom Penh. The Cambodian students who participated in the workshops were incredibly engaged and enthusiastic. The students' evaluations (by questionnaire) indicated a very positive response to the workshops. All of the workshop resources were donated to the two universities so that the staff could continue to implement similar workshops, and plans were developed to continue our collaboration by developing more resourced workshops for this purpose in the future. Two staff members from Cambodia will travel to Melbourne to participate in anatomy workshops and dissection classes at the University of Melbourne. We hope that this extension of the collaboration provides further support and impetus for the development of anatomy education in Cambodia in the future.