Anatomy education for medical students in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland in 2019: a twenty year follow up

Anatomical education in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland has long been under scrutiny, especially since the reforms triggered in 1993 by the General Medical Council's "Tomorrow's Doctors". The aim of the current study was to investigate the state of medical student anatomy education in the UK and Ireland in 2019. Thirty-nine medical schools completed the survey (100% response rate) and trained 10,093 medical students per year cohort. The teachers comprised 760 individuals, of these 143 were employed on full-time teaching contracts and 103 were employed on education and research contracts. Since a previous survey in 1999, the number of part-time staff has increased by 300%, including a significant increase in the number of anatomy demonstrators. In 2019, anatomy was predominantly taught to medical students in either a system-based or hybrid curriculum. Thirty-four medical schools (87%) used human cadavers to teach anatomy, with a total of 1,363 donors being used per annum. Gross anatomy teaching was integrated with medical imaging in 95% of medical schools, embryology in 81%, living anatomy in 78%, neuroanatomy in 73% and histology in 68.3%. Throughout their five years of study, medical students are allocated on average 85 hours of taught time for gross anatomy, 24 hours for neuroanatomy, 24 hours for histology, 11 hours for living anatomy and 10 for embryology. In the past twenty years there has been an average loss of 39 hours dedicated to gross anatomy teaching and a reduction in time dedicated to all other anatomy subdisciplines.