Using videoconferencing to deliver anatomy teaching to medical students on clinical placements

Medical students are classically taught anatomy towards the start of their medical curriculum, typically in their first and second year of study. During this phase of training, most of the teaching hours are delivered on site at a higher education institution rather than a clinical setting. The number of hours of anatomy teaching delivery then tends to fall sharply as these students enter their ‘clinical phase’, where they are mainly taught in clinical healthcare settings. As the students are then dispersed across multiple sites, anatomy teaching delivery becomes more challenging. On occasion, students may be able to return to central anatomy facilities, but when this is not possible, technology enhanced learning (TEL) can become invaluable.In this article, we would like to share our pilot of using videoconferencing technology to co-deliver teaching sessions for students on clinical placement. We describe two examples of teaching sessions run using the ‘Microsoft Surface Hub’, linking between the clinical placement sites at Bristol Medical School and the Centre for Applied Anatomy. We hope by sharing our experience and showing the advantages of using this technology to bring the anatomy and clinical components together, whilst acknowledging its limitations, we will encourage others to trial new and innovative methods of exploring anatomy teaching delivery in the distributed medical education models seen during the clinical years of medical undergraduate training. Keywords: Anatomy, Undergraduate medical education, Technology enhanced learning, Videoconferencing, Microsoft surface hub, Curriculum development