Lacunae regarding dearth of dissection-based teaching during COVID-19 pandemic: how to cope with it?

In view of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, anatomy education programs were amended so as to shift to primarily online mode from physical classes. In the whole process, main concern area that has emerged is regarding dearth of physical human dissection sessions. There is enough evidence available in literature to suggest that dissection room is an ideal place to cultivate and inculcate discipline independent skills or humanistic skills among the students. These include attributes in relation to ethical practice, professionalism, communication skills, empathy and compassion. Imbibing these skills are an essential element of medical education curriculum as it is desirable that students exhibit these traits when they begin medical practice. Hence deficiency in terms of exposure to physical dissection sessions can adversely affect training of medical students on a long term.

A literature search of relevant, peer-reviewed, published articles was undertaken from indexed databases (Medline and PubMed, Scopus, Embase, CINAHL Plus, Web of Science and Google Scholar) for this study.

To counter the pertinent issue in online anatomy teaching program, a few measures have been suggested in this paper based on identification of actual deficit areas in terms of learning and analysis thereof. Live streaming of real time dissection, awareness sessions on human dissection, online interactive learning sessions and reflective thoughts-based exercise can contribute to building discipline independent skills in present scenario.

Incorporation and implementation of these interventions within the realm of online anatomy education programs during COVID-19 pandemic can possibly contribute towards desirable learning outcomes.