The Impact of the Covid‐19 Pandemic on Current Anatomy Education and Future Careers: A Student’s Perspective

Abstract

To the Editor, Anatomical Sciences Education: As both an anatomy student and anatomy demonstrator, Anatomical Sciences Education has become my go-to journal to further my knowledge of the latest developments in anatomy education, innovations in pedagogical practice, and indeed perspectives on current affairs in the field. The world is experiencing an ongoing and serious pandemic, and I felt it necessary to comment, from the perspective of a student, on the impact this pandemic has had and is having on students' anatomical education, and my concerns about the implications it might have on the future of current anatomy students. In the remainder of this letter, I wish to present some of my reflections on this matter. Readers will be aware that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus began in Wuhan, China, in late December 2019 (Zhu et al., 2020), and spread exponentially in our age where increasing urbanization and frequent international travel allow for the uninterrupted transmission of infectious diseases (Alirol et al., 2011). The first reported case in the United States was on 20th January 2020 (Holshue et al., 2020), and the first cases in the United Kingdom was detected on 31st January (Moss et al., 2020). The World Health Organization named the disease caused by this severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) as Covid-19 on 11th February (WHO, 2020a), and subsequently labeled it a pandemic on 11th March (WHO, 2020b). On 2nd April, the number of cases reported worldwide crossed 1 million, with 205 countries and territories affected (Worldometer, 2020). As governments struggle to contain the vicious spread of Covid-19, and with over a third of the world's population currently under some form of lockdown (Kaplan et al., 2020), the effects the virus has had on people's daily lives is clearly like nothing most people have experienced before. One of the many affected sectors is education (UNESCO, 2020). In the United Kingdom, the majority of universities and medical schools had suspended face-to-face teaching by 17th March 2020 (Staton and Jack, 2020), forcing students to move to online distance learning for the indefinite future. Pandemics are not a new occurrence. Indeed, Galen of Pergamon documented a 20-year smallpox pandemic starting in 166 AD (Mattern, 2011), and more recently the world experienced the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (LeDuc and Barry, 2004) and 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemics (Collignon, 2011). Although the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to be the first which current anatomy students are affected by, lessons and experiences can be drawn from the previous crises to help us adapt and continue education. For example, web-based learning was already successfully used in the 2003 pandemic to minimize the reduction in education that students received (Patil et al., 2003; Lim et al., 2009), and is once again being used to great effect (Lim, 2020). It is of course entirely possible for students to learn anatomy without a cadaver and solely from textbooks and online resources (McMenamin et al., 2018), and indeed a number of medical schools no longer use cadaver dissection (Patel et al., 2015). However, the disappeared practical teaching at the hands of Covid-19, regardless of whether students normally receive cadaveric teaching or not, will most likely have many lasting impacts on students. In light of the learning environment now being far less than optimal, the loss of face-to-face contact and direct interactions with both peers and teachers may potentially stunt students' development as anatomists. Despite the advances in technology that allow for online distance learning, acquiring anatomical knowledge in the laboratory, ideally through cadaver dissection, is often still regarded as not only a rite of passage but also the most effective method (Ghosh, 2017). When students lost access to dissection rooms, they lost access not only to cadavers, but also to a range of other optimal learning modalities: prosections, models, pathology specimens, skeletons, and others (Sugand et al., 2010). Previous authors have highlighted that the modern medical curriculum already restricts students' exposure to anatomy (Warner and Rizzolo, 2006), and indeed this pandemic has further shortened the contact time current students have received. As a result, current anatomy students are being taught anatomy without access to practical-based learning materials, be that cadavers, prosections, or models. Anatomy learning without cadavers is a practice which is generally seen as less favorable, but one which has arguable merits and has been used as standard in many institutions (McLachlan et al., 2004), but when prosections, models, and other learning materials are also removed, learning becomes difficult. Adaptation to online distance learning is no easy task for students or teachers, and simply providing an online atlas is unlikely to provide students with an "appreciation for the fabric of the human