Best Practices

Teaching anatomy to students through cadaver dissection has been an age old, time tested practice. Despite of technology revolution and advances in instrumentation nothing could surpass the traditional cadaver dissection. The benefit afforded by this method is its contribution to all three domains i,e cognitive, affective and psychomotor of learning. Also the cadaver skills lab has helped in developing surgical skills and sculpting an efficient surgeon out of postgraduate trainers.
Bodies have also been helpful in continued medical education hands on workshops in various surgical skills. But there has been a dearth demand for supply of cadaver to achieve these virtuous learning requirements. To take care of the need of Cadavers for UG / PG student learning of Anatomy and utilisation of body for research & training purposes the body donation association was started

Objectives of Practice

Video based teaching
Museum
Voluntary body donation programme
To sensitize the public on significance of body donation in learning and research
To develop registry of willing to donate and donated bodies
To employ standard operating procedure of BDA
To utilize donated bodies for novel cause
To teach Anatomy from a real human bodies
To take up research work on different disease condition
To train faculty and PG students through hands on workshops

The Practice

Obstacles if any and strategies to overcome them

Very few. Some sentimental feelings of relatives, some of the family members not very comfortable for donation cause inconvenience & delay in the process. This is overcome by counselling & discussion to convince them the advantages of body donation with examples of previous donors, which in majority of cases solves the problem.

The availability of storage space for donated cadavers. New metal tanks were procured and the space for storage tanks was extended to accommodate more tanks

Impact of Practice

The JSS Body Donation Association working since 21 years and overwhelming response was obtained from public and this is depicted by number of registered and donated bodies.

Number of registered bodies: 3370

Number of donated bodies:429

Number of schools visited to museum: 10 per year

Number of external activities organised from BDA: 6 programs per year

Number of cadaver skills workshops organised: 2 per year

The family members & friends are extremely happy about the whole procedure & in turn motivate other to register for a good cause and this led to increase in number of registrations.

No Of Donors Registered

Body Donated

Resources required

Manpower to disseminate information on voluntary body donation , preserve and store cadavers
Manpower to respond to the calls by relatives including odd hours, holidays & festival days (24/7)
Ambulance to transport the bodies
Trained faculty to embalm the cadavers efficiently
Infrastructure to preserve the cadaver preservation and storage materials to store them

Contact details of Secretary, Body Donation

Name: Dr.N.M.Shamasundar

Mobile No: 9845206284

Email Id: nmshamsundar@jssuni.edu.in