Welcome Message
The COVID-19 situation remains challenging. In these difficult and uncertain times, we hope everybody is staying healthy and safe. Though we are facing this public health emergency of unprecedented scale, it can also be a great opportunity for
transformational changes. To cope with the pandemic, there is a surge of collaborative research to develop diagnostics, vaccines and therapies to fight against the coronavirus; we have seen many exciting biomedical technologies coming out from Hong Kong and worldwide too. This also reveals the necessity to enhance data and resource sharing, as well as knowledge exchange, among researchers of different disciplines for rapid innovations to prepare for future health emergencies. Agility has never been more important than it is now for research and many aspects. Let’s continue equipping ourselves and staying together to quickly respond to unexpected challenges and explore new opportunities for innovations that may arise in the future.
Dr. Alan Wong Member, Knowledge Exchange and Global Committee School of Biomedical Sciences
Teaching and Learning Ongoing Initiatives in Anatomy Teaching Feature Story
Contributed by Dr. Tomasz Stanislaw Cecot, Senior Lecturer
asked our students for a short reflection about their first patient – The Great Body Teacher - to ensure that we create a reflective environment and focus on professionalism. The Body Donation Programme is an example of world-leading programmes of its kind in the world, with the Body Donation Day celebrated annually on 3rd March. Anatomy Near-Peer Teachers (ANPTs) are a group of senior students coming to the anatomy lab, helping juniors achieve learning outcomes during the dissection classes. The development of this programme is quite crucial in modern anatomy education and brilliantly expresses the Faculty’s peer-education trend. Our near-peer teachers have purple/violet gowns, which is different from the students’ yellow gowns and pink gowns of the staff making them easy to spot and ask for help. ANPTs are specially trained not only to know the dissection material but also how to be active teachers, which makes them different from classical demonstrators employed by many traditional Anatomy Departments. We also invite surgeons to our anatomy sessions, perform live USG demonstrations and teach interpretation of radiological images (X-rays, CT scans and MRI), making these sessions truly clinically oriented. Smaller initiatives focus on “making learning happen” in time and places suitable for our students. We placed some anatomy models in the Learning Commons, which hopefully will develop into a more extensive anatomy self-directed learning room . In cooperation with the library, we offer access to many teaching materials, including Acland’s Atlas of Human Anatomy and the Complete Anatomy app . Running morphological sciences teaching activities is not an easy task, but this is possible and pleasurable with the brilliant team and excellent students!
The Anatomy Team is a group of dynamic and dedicated teachers. The team’s core members are involved in designing various learning activities, delivery of teaching, and preparation of assessment in a wide range of morphological sciences - gross anatomy, histology, and embryology. Our everyday actions are supported by administrative and technical staff. We are very grateful for all work done to ensure that our students will have the best possible learning experience. The most important places for our face-to-face teaching are Anatomy Dissection Laboratory (ADL, 1st Floor, Lab Building) and Multidisciplinary Labs (MDL 1-3, Ground Floor, Lab Building). MDL labs were recently adapted to run Virtual Reality Anatomy Practicals and Anatomage (virtual dissection table) sessions. We also use the Apeiro Virtual Microscope system to support histology teaching. New touch screens (Microsoft Surface Hub) allow group interactions and constant feedback when doing exercises. Several new initiatives introduced in recent years are responsible for the significant shift of the pedagogical strategies into a student-centred approach. The major one is the introduction of the Task-Oriented Practicals (TOPs) , where the classical demonstrations are replaced by a series of tasks, which stimulate students’ engagement allowing group discussions, discoveries, hands-on-activities and solving clinical problems. In the Covid-19 pandemic, we also used this approach in online classrooms to motivate students to work as teams in breakout rooms and actively discuss problems. There are two main approaches to anatomy teaching – prosection and dissection, and we use both styles regarding the needs of our students. Prosections are high-quality specimens already made by skilful technicians. This approach is mainly adopted to anatomy teaching of BBMS, Pharmacy, Nursing, Chinese Medicine and Dental students. The primary approach for MBBS students is dissection, where students actively, in small groups, systematically learn the structure of the human body, layer by layer, in different anatomical regions. We recently introduced dissection-based learning not only for the thorax, abdomen and limbs but also extended that into more challenging dissections of the head and pelvic region . Last year we also designed a new practical, “Introduction to Anatomy”, where students are introduced to all body systems and their significant organs at the beginning of their learning journey. This year, after this practical, we
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