Survey of Gross Anatomy Education in China: The Past and the Present

Medical education in mainland China has undergone massive expansion and reforms in the past decades. A nation-wide survey of the five-year clinical medicine programs aimed to examine the course hours, pedagogies, learning resources and teaching staff of anatomy both at present and over the past three decades (1990-1999, 2000-2009, and 2010-2018). The directors or senior teachers from 90 out of the 130 five-year clinical medicine programs were invited to fill out a factual questionnaire by email. Ultimately, sixty-five completed questionnaires were received from 65 different schools. It was found that the total number of gross anatomy course hours has decreased by 11% in the past 30 years and that systematic and regional anatomy have been increasingly taught separately among the surveyed medical schools. Problem-based learning has been adopted in thirty-five (54%) of the surveyed schools, and team-based learning is used in ten (15%) of the surveyed schools. The surveyed schools reported receiving more donated cadavers in recent years, with the average number increasing from 20.67 ± 20.29 in 2000-2009 to 36.10 ± 47.26 in 2010-2018. However, this has not resulted in a decrease in the number of students who needed to share one cadaver (11.85 ± 5.03 in 1990-1999 to 14.22 ± 5.0 in 2010-2018). A decreasing trend regarding the teacher-student ratio (1:25.5 in 2000-2009 to 1:33.2 in 2010-2018) was also reported. The survey demonstrated the historical changes in gross anatomy education in China over the past thirty years.