LEANBODY: education development project of UPMS to catch up with European elite universities

The European Union project (LEANBODY ERASMUS+ KA2 project) won by the UPMS anatomists is going well; it is a collaboration with Croatian and Czech colleagues, anatomists from Cambridge and education development and quality control experts from the Karolinska Institutet. The project is a rethinking of the traditions of anatomy education with respect to the modern globalisation challenges. The focus is quality, high failure rates, student-educator mental health and the protection of the current true value of educations traditions. The professional coordinator of the project is associate professor dr. András Dávid Nagy.

Between August 15 and 19, 2022, seven colleagues from the Anatomy Department (professor dr. Dóra Reglődi, vice-dean for science, dr. Andrea Lubics, dr. András Nagy, dr. Zoltán Rékási, dr. Tibor Hollósy, dr. László Kovács and dr. Jason Sparks) and the members of the project’s professional team (Laura Berta Csík, head of the Student Service Department, Csilla Glück and Péterné Vonyó, colleagues of the Chancellor’s Office) took part in an all-encompassing training at the University of Cambridge in the framework of the LEANBODY Project.

The LEANBODY Project is an international cooperation led by the associate professor of the UPMS Anatomy Department, dr. András Dávid Nagy. Its aim is to acquire the education methodology techniques and views necessary for teaching human anatomy efficiently in a multicultural and multilingual environment. The goal is to compare the pros and cons of Eastern and Western-European anatomy education, and implement the discovered best practices into our education system at the end of the project. The partners in the project are the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), the Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), the University of Zagreb (Croatia) and the Masaryk University Brno (Czechia).

The first meetup of colleagues participating in the project was in Brno in December 2021, where we established the basics and the goals for the duration of the project. The aim of the August meeting was to learn how colleagues from Western universities think about teaching. We have heard a lot about the importance of professionalism in the everyday life, and they also emphasized knowing about the sustainable development goals outlined by the UN, especially goal number 4 – quality education. Multiple sensitive topics were discussed, including dealing with students with mental health problems, cultural differences experienced with international students, and the need to reform education figures (it is entirely common that anatomy handouts only use figures of white males, and there is a demand for figures using other races as well in anatomy education). We have returned to Pécs with a lot of new experiences and viewpoints, and we are thankful for the opportunity to have met professor Cecilia Brassett, head of the Cambridge Anatomy Department, who introduced us to the Cambridge college system.

The next collaboration option will be in the summer of 2023, when we will welcome the participants of the project here in Pécs. We hope that we will get more tips and will gain more experience which will help us to make anatomy education even higher quality in all partner institutions.

Author: Dr. Jason Sparks, University of Pécs Medical School Anatomy Department

Source: https://aok.pte.hu/en/hirek/hir/15401