The Public's Knowledge of Anatomy as a Primer for Medical Education
Authors: Taylor Adam M. , Diggle Peter , Wessels Quenton 
Published: June 2021

Undergraduate anatomical content of medical curricula is vast and must be learnt over multiple years before students can apply this knowledge in clinical practice. On graduation medical students, and allied health professionals are deemed competent in their anatomical knowledge and communication of this. We have previously shown the level of anatomical knowledge in the public is varied (Taylor, 2017). There is an assumed uniform level of knowledge of patients by medical professionals, and this may have an impact on the success of communication between patients and medical professionals, particularly those who have a reduced knowledge of anatomy. We have undertaken a further survey of the anatomical knowledge of the general public to emphasise the existence of the varied level of knowledge. We utilized public engagement events to offer the opportunity for members of the public to complete a questionnaire. Participants were asked to place 20 structures onto a blank map of the body, they then recorded their age, gender, highest academic qualification, whether they worked in healthcare and if they had visited a healthcare professional in the last 7 days. Questionnaires were scored independently by 2 anatomists and responses categorized to examine statistical differences between groups for age, gender, working healthcare, highest academic qualification and whether they had undertaken a visit to a healthcare professional in the last 7 days. Statistical significance between groups were determined by ANOVA using Graphpad Prism 5. This study was approved by Lancaster University's FHM Research Ethics Committee. Our respondents (n=109) were aged between 6–90 years, with a mean age of 36 years. Our results demonstrated 100% of participants correctly identified the anatomical location of the brain, with 89% and 88% correctly identifying the location of the biceps and cornea. Interestingly, triceps was only answered correctly by 66% of the participants and both hamstrings and quadriceps being correctly answered by 57% of respondents. The triceps were often labelled in the forearm and the hamstrings and quadriceps were often confused. The abdominal organs were consistently poorly answered, with adrenals, spleen, gallbladder and pancreas, scoring only 14%, 17%, 24% and 27% correct respectively. The only abdominal organ that was correctly placed by over 50% of respondents was the kidneys; 59%, all other abdominal structures scored under 50%. There was no statistical significance in the number of correct answers when comparing between males and females (p=0.086), across age groups (p=0.052), highest academic qualification (p=0.080) and whether an individual had visited a healthcare professional in the last week (p=0.097). Individuals who worked in healthcare scored significantly better than those who did not (p=0.007).

Our results add further evidence to the varied knowledge of the general public. A basic level of anatomical knowledge of the public may help them correctly seek medical advice for urgent and non‐urgent issues relating to their body, specifically abdominal issues where respondents scored weakest. The findings of this study emphasize the possible mismatch in anatomical knowledge between clinicians and patients. Students should be aware of this in order to ensure effective communication.

This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.