ANATOMY 1 Name of the Department: Department ... - Biomeedikum

PATHOLOGICAL ANATOMY AND FORENSIC MEDICINE
3. Describe the strengths and weaknesses of the teaching in your department.
Strengths
1. Students have the possibility to watch closely the autopsies and in some
cases even carry out the autopsies by themselves. It gives them good understanding
of the speciality and makes them remember their knowledge of
anatomy and pathological anatomy.
2. Situation-exercises of cases of forensic medicine make the students operate
with the obtained theoretical knowledge and put it into practice. They
are given three types of excersises: a) crime scene investigation (by photos);
b) forensic expertise of living person; c) forensic expertise of dead
body. Working through the cases students train to describe the crime
scene and post-morten changes of the dead body, estimate time of death,
describe injuries, determine the cause of death, compose the forensic
medical diagnosis and expert opinion, fill the certificate of death and so on.
All the cases are discussed in the seminars and this makes possible to correct
misunderstandings and students have the opportunity to ask the
teachers questions that have rised up. By this kind of training it is easy to
justify the speciality as important.
3. We have a unique collection of macro-preparations that are of great help in
teaching pathological changes of organs due to diseases and injuries.
4. In the seminars we use a collection of colour slides and CD-ROM of forensic
pathology atlas.
5. Students get a good view of different laboratory investigations that are
used in forensic medicine.
6. As we have had good contacts with several European universities we have
already started to harmonize our curriculum with the curriculum used in
other European universities.
Weaknesses
1. Our staff has not trained their pedagogic skills.
2. Sometimes we still tend to teach too much theory and tend to forget that
we are teaching young doctors who are often more interested in clinical
disciplines than in our speciality and that it is up to us to arouse their interest
to forensic medicine. This can be done only by showing them the links
between forensic medicine and clinic and make them think about the juridical
side of their future work.
3. In the lectures there could be used much more computer-aided teaching
methods (for example CD-ROMs of forensic pathology, slide shows in
Power Point program).
4. As our staff is quite young and has worked as a team only 5 years we have
not managed to publish enough textbooks in Estonian, which students
could easily use for independent study.
5. We do not demonstrate micro-preparations to the students.
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