Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Hannah James makes a persuasive case for the use of donated bodies and body parts in surgical training, enabling high fidelity training, improved competency of surgeons and reduced risk of harm to patients from trainees ‘learning on the job’.1 She also identifies some pertinent ethical questions that arise from this practice that should be considered by training organisations, regulatory authorities and the trainees themselves.
Many countries throughout the world have regulated programmes, governed by strict ethical principles, for donating bodies, usually to academic institutions for the purposes of medical education.2 In the UK the Human Tissue Authority sets out guiding principles for institutions licensed to handle human tissue including donation of bodies for anatomical examination, education and research; consent, dignity, quality, and honesty and openness.3 The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, in its 2011 report, Human Bodies: donation for medicine and research, identified a number of relevant ethical values including autonomy, altruism, justice, dignity, reciprocity, maximising welfare, and honesty and respect.4 While this report did not focus specifically on donation of human tissue for education and training the principles identified are equally relevant in this context. In terms of maximising welfare whole body donation for education and training provides benefit to many patients over a relatively short time frame …
Footnotes
Contributors The author developed the idea for the paper in collaboration with HJ, author of the target article. The author had sole responsibility for drafting and editing the text.
Funding The author has not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Use of cadavers to train surgeons: what are the ethical issues?
- Use of cadavers to train surgeons: closing comment
- Proceeding with clinical trials of animal to human organ transplantation: a way out of the dilemma
- From undergraduate to postgraduate uses of the dead human body: consequential ethical shift
- Use of cadavers to train surgeons: what are the ethical issues? — body donor perspective
- Demographic and motivational factors affecting the whole-body donation programme in Nanjing, China: a cross-sectional survey
- The ethics of testing and research of manufactured organs on brain-dead/recently deceased subjects
- Cadavers as teachers: the dissecting room experience in Thailand
- Acquisition and retention of military surgical competencies: a survey of surgeons’ experiences in the UK Defence Medical Services
- Is it just semantics? Medical students and their ‘first patients’