Learning Together about Anatomical Variation Across Species: Examples from Veterinary and Medical Education
Authors: Larsen Roxanne 
Published: June 2021

Exploring the connections among human, animal, and environmental health is a key component of the One Health Initiative and should be incorporated into education programs for the health professions. The One Health Initiative provides a framework of core competencies including domains such as management, communication, leadership, collaboration, and systems thinking. These competencies are especially important in a world with emerging diseases, impacts from climate change, and the growing interface between humans and animals.

Here, I provide a few examples of educational activities that highlight the use of comparative anatomy as a mechanism to practice and reinforce skills that emphasize the core competency domains. I also provide additional details on how these educational opportunities can become a regular part of an active and multidisciplinary curriculum of health professions programs. These educational activities include some key features. First, the most conducive active‐learning settings are often in laboratory‐based courses (e.g., gross anatomy, microanatomy). Second, activities are simple and repeatable and focused on concepts that are shared by different learners. Third, activities bring different learners together to share knowledge, experiences, and perspectives on healthcare. Each of these features are mappable to the core competencies and are often already components of the overarching curriculum of traditional health professions programs.

Specific examples include having learners from different anatomy courses (e.g., veterinary, human) collect data on variation in anatomical structures, provide background information on the known variation, and describe the variation found in their cohort of specimens. Professional students present their findings to one another, provide context and functional significance, teach each other the anatomy of their profession, and explain why this information would be important for their patients and clients. For example, if students were measuring components of the GI tract, facilitators could include group and class discussions on the potential for shared microbiomes in humans and companion animals, as well as incorporate research articles and information on beneficial and harmful microbes that may be in the GI tracts of the hosts.

To emphasize best practices, educators should take advantage of active‐learning settings (i.e., laboratory‐based course components, team‐based learning) to emphasize communication, collaboration, and problem‐solving skills while fostering an educational environment that focuses on knowledge of transdisciplinary sciences, awareness of social and cultural aspects of health, and developing professional characteristics when evaluating policies and interacting with communities. The end objective in these educational activities is to promote awareness and a broad‐based global health perspective, as opposed to an emphasis on specializing early in training. All of these factors highlight the need for a One Health focused education system, that can meet the changing healthcare needs of a global population.

Support or Funding Information

American Association of Anatomists

This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.