.. today’s residents in surgery are learning their anatomy on sick patients for the first time in the middle of the night: operating without a firm Tubacin Sigma knowledge of anatomy leads to increased mortality and morbidity�� [12]. Waterston and Stewart [13] gathered clinicians’ opinions on this subject with a survey and their results indicate that the majority of clinicians believe that anatomy is not adequately taught, and as a result, students’ knowledge is below the minimum standard required for safe medical practice.The thorny question is why students do not seem to have enough anatomical knowledge to practice safely. The answers are various: ranging from reduced teaching hours, to recently developed teaching methods not including compulsory dissecting and light microscopy sessions.
Two recent studies report that in Australian Medical Schools gross anatomy teaching had reduced from approximately 500 hours per year in its former undergraduate medical degree to an average of 52.5 hours in its new graduate medical program [7, 14]. More recently, medical education has experienced changes driven by evidence from the fields of psychology and education: retention of knowledge is promoted when students are actively involved in their learning and curricula integration seems to be an essential component of this process. The rationale often given for integration of the basic sciences and clinical medicine is that integration is the right way a clinician must think about when in contact with a patient.
In this context, problem-based learning (PBL) and computer-assisted learning (CAL) allow horizontal and vertical integration of different disciplines enhancing the integration of students’ knowledge; moreover, using case studies, students can link clinical features with basic science concepts.Today, as a result of this, many medical schools have incorporated active learning methods such as problem-based learning (PBL) and computer-assisted learning (CAL) into their courses [15] where the main feature is the integration of different basic science disciplines in one course. Although a shift is clearly visible from ����traditional�� teacher-centerd education, with students as passive recipients of information, to ����innovative�� student-centerd education, concern is rising about the level of knowledge achieved by students graduating from innovative programs, for basic sciences in general, and for anatomy in particular [16].
In recent studies on curriculum integration and different strategies to implement it [17, 18], it has been reported that, although curriculum integration at the beginning of medical training made perfect sense, this skill is not intuitive to many students, mainly first year students, Anacetrapib who fail to see how various concepts from different sciences could fit together.