Body donations, vital means of learning for med students, resume post Covid

Medical colleges managed with donations from the previous years during the pandemic

After a pause during the pandemic, voluntary donation of bodies for medical education has resumed.

Medical colleges did not accept the bodies of those who pledged it because of the virus scare. Now, they feel heartened to see people pledging bodies to educate budding doctors and surgeons.

When alive, a willing donor is briefed on what their bodies will be used for by the college and is explicitly asked the reason for the pledge. Two family members bear witness to the pledge.

Sri Atal Bihari Vajpayee Medical College and Research Institute, for instance, received five donor bodies in 2019, but the numbers dropped to just one in 2020 during the pandemic. In 2021 though, donations rose to 16.

Dr S Venkata Raghava, professor of forensic medicine at the institute, said they used bodies donated in 2019 or unclaimed bodies from medico-legal cases for dissection in the lean year.

“We received an ICMR communication in 2020 saying we cannot receive donated bodies during the pandemic,” said Dr Balachandra N, professor and HOD with East Point College
of Medical Sciences and Research Centre.

“We had one or two body donations before the March lockdown, which we used. If there was a shortage, we used 3D simulations of the human body for teaching.”

Dr Yogitha Ravindranath, professor and head, anatomy, St John’s Medical College, which takes only registered donors, said cadaver dissections is one of the resource study materials for learning anatomy “both at the graduate and post-graduate level”, despite the suspension of registered voluntary body donation during the pandemic.

“But we used the pre-pandemic donations for learning,” she added. The college’s 150 students divide themselves into groups of 15 to learn from 10 dissection tables with a body each on them.

“The challenge now is how to store the bodies; we have an enormous number of donors,” she said without revealing the precise number of bodies the college has received.

Dr Dinesh Rao, professor and HOD of forensic medicine at Oxford Medical College, pointed to the National Medical Commission norms requiring 10 bodies to be stored at the embalming tank for a batch of 150 students. “We have had no donations and procured just three bodies from the police since 2020,” he said.

On the other hand, Dr K V Satish, HOD, forensic medicine, Victoria Hospital, said they received more than 14 bodies so far in 2022.

Dr Harish, associate dean and vice-principal, Ramaiah Medical College, said a robust list of 4,000 donors has helped them despite the suspension of the donor programme during the pandemic. The college has started accepting bodies again.

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