The use of dissection to study human anatomy is the foundation for educational excellence among future health professionals, as it offers an ideal opportunity to learn the body's morphology in three dimensions while also providing students with a more humanistic education. The shortage of bodies for dissection, combined with the Brazilian population's lack of knowledge concerning the possibility of voluntarily donating their own bodies, led to the creation of the Body Donation Programs for Education and Research in Anatomy at the Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre (UFCSPA). The program is based on three pillars: Informing the general public about the program, donor registration, and donation itself. Since the creation of the donor program in 2008, there has been an increase in both the number of donations made during donor's lifetime and the number of bodies received by the university. There has also been a shift in relation to the origin of these bodies, as before the creation of the program most bodies were unclaimed cadavers, while today most of the bodies are sourced from voluntary donations. The initial results regarding the public's acceptance of the possibility of making body donations have been encouraging, as shown by the annual growth in donor registrations. Consequently, the quality and quantity of the material available for educational purposes have greatly improved.

3921 adults randomly selected from across Great Britain were interviewed. Subjects were asked to assess a selection of 10 out of 200 vignettes. Each vignette contained four elements: a category of individual; access to some or all of the health record; specified purpose; and level of patient identifier. Subjects were asked to say how happy they would be to allow access to their health record in the circumstances described.The public were generally happy to provide access to health information. For almost a third of vignettes, subjects said that they would be very happy to allow access to their health information. 9.1% of subjects said that they would be very happy to allow access within all of the vignettes that they were asked to assess. There was however, a significant minority of responses (11.6%) to vignettes where subjects said that they would be very unhappy to allow access. In addition 2.1% of individuals said that they were very unhappy with all of the vignettes presented to them. Individuals from higher social groups, older people and males were more likely to be happy with access to their health information. The individual requesting information was the most important factor determining permission to access health information. Subjects were happier to release anonymised rather than personally identifiable data. Content of the information to be released did not seem to be that important, even when the health record contained sensitive information. With the exception of teaching students, the use of the information wasn't an important determinant of consent.Despite a level of support for use of health information in most circumstances, this doesn't mean that patients don't want to be asked for consent, nor that the views of the small minority can be ignored. The ethical and policy implications of these findings will be discussed.