"A boat sails, the moon shines, a triangular pea flies…" - do physiotherapy students find it difficult to learn the...

Human anatomy is a key subject in medical education and the foundation of clinical practice. Learning anatomy can be challenging for medical and health science students because they have to memorize a large number of anatomical terms. The structure of the hand is extremely complex due to the number of bones, ligaments, and tendons - structures that a physiotherapist must be able to recognize precisely. The aim of the study was to assess physiotherapy students' knowledge of the location and names of the bones of the hand.

The study was conducted among second-year physiotherapy students from three Polish universities who had completed an anatomy course. A total of 537 students (191 men and 346 women) took part in the study. Each participant had to correctly identify the bones of the hand in the illustration. The test was an extended version of the "Carpal Bone Test". The results were statistically analyzed using TIBCO Statistica 13.3 software.

Statistical analysis showed that only 32.2% of physiotherapy students were able to correctly identify all 12 bones present in the diagram, while 84.4% identified six or more of them. An analysis of the correctness of the identification of individual bones of the hand showed that the lunate bone (85.1%) and the distal phalanx (87%) were most often correctly identified. The highest error rates were observed for the trapezium and proximal phalanx (30% of participants were unable to identify them). The average number of correctly identified carpal bones was 6.

When teaching students the anatomy of the hand bones, special attention should be paid to the shape and position of individual bones in relation to one another in order to avoid errors in their identification. The Hand Bone Test, extended to include the metacarpals and fingers, is a simple and easy-to-use tool that provides an objective assessment of the level of knowledge of hand anatomy. In the case of Polish students, certain errors can be attributed to the similarity of anatomical names in the Polish language.