Description:
<jats:p>There is current debate about the value of anonymity in willed body donors for first year medical students. Some claim that allowing the students to know more about the donors can enhance their empathy and can provide early experience in the doctor – patient relationship. Others claim that knowing too much about the donors may make the dissection experience more traumatic and can take away from the student's anatomical learning experience. To gain a student's perspective on this issue, first year medical students in two different curricular tracks at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine were surveyed both before and after they completed their first year gross anatomy course (IRB 20160480). One curricular track provides 150 students with a short, eight week, high intensity anatomy course while the other track provides 50 students with a longer, 6 month, low intensity course. The online survey asked the students to rate how much personal information about the donors they would like to receive. The survey response rate was 76% and 63% for the pre‐ and post‐ short anatomy course with response rates of 58% and 56% for the pre‐ and post‐ long anatomy course. There was no difference in the results between the two curricular tracks and no difference in the results before or after taking the anatomy course. The results found that the students would prefer to have information about the donors that includes their medical history, social history and socioeconomic status (3.7 mean Likert score), but are less interested in having complete information about the donors (name, religion, political affiliation) (2.4 mean Likert score). Comments by the students suggested that knowing too much information could have a negative impact on their ability to perform invasive dissections and could have negative emotional effects. The students felt, however, that knowing the donor's medical and social history would allow them to appreciate and synthesize the anatomical information to a greater degree. These results indicate that students would like more pertinent medical information about their donors, but that they have concerns about knowing the complete information about their willed body donors.</jats:p><jats:p>This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in <jats:italic>The FASEB Journal</jats:italic>.</jats:p>