Ways to improve soft skills model for teaching topographic anatomy and operative surgery
This article focuses on new ways to improve soft-skills training as well as to teach topographic anatomy and operative surgery. A key objective of contemporary professional education, particularly, that in medicine, is to build professional and discipline-specific competencies. This, however, is not sufficient for day-to-day medical practice. To develop as professionals, students need so-called universal competencies. Before constructing a new model of studying a discipline, it was important to know what students thought of current methods of knowledge assessment. Two hundred seventy students were surveyed to explore their attitudes to testing, working with digital anatomical maps, and a possible improvement of the training process by using interactive 3D anatomical atlases and distance learning elements in studying clinical anatomy cases. The findings suggest that traditional assessment methods neither improve academic performance nor contribute to «knowledge longevity». Using digital anatomical maps, however, is positively associated with better knowledge of the discipline. Teamwork on clinical anatomy cases while employing interactive 3D anatomical atlases, learning surgical skills as part of a surgical team, and role reversal increase motivation and build the foundations of new clinical thinking based on a rational combination of hard and soft skills.