Gender medicine in the programs of the Italian public institutions: the role of FNOMCeO

Teresita Mazzei

President of Florence Medical Council and Chair of FNOMCeO Gender Medicine Committee, Italy

About 400,000 active medical doctors of the Italian health system did not receive any pre-graduate education on health and gender medicine. Since June 13th 2019 in Italy we have, as the first country in Europe, a specific law for the application and spreading of gender medicine in the national health system.

FNOMCeO (National Federation of the Orders of Doctors and Dentists) is a public institution, subsidiary of the State, whose main purpose is to update the Code of Ethics for Italian physicians and to check that they respect it. According to the Code of Ethics the post graduated-education on gender medicine is mandatory. Both FNOMCeO and the Provincial Medical Councils are accredited providers for continual medical education and they have been organizing residential post-graduate training courses for several years.




In 2014 FNOMCeO set up a specific Committee for Health and Gender Medicine composed of both experts and Presidents or Vice-Presidents of the Local Medical Councils (Table 1). The aims of the Committee are to plan post-graduate training courses, to inform citizens, to take part to the national and international network for gender medicine, to cooperate with other Italian public institutions and to encourage clinical research (Table 2).

Since 2014 this committee has been organizing 20 residential courses and workshops, and it has been taking part of symposia organized by the most important national scientific societies (for example, general practitioners, hospital doctors, etc.). In the last 10 months Italian medical doctors or dentists have received more than 28,000 CME credits through a FNOMCeO course in distance learning (FAD). The committee is also planning new distance learning courses focused on cardiovascular, respiratory tract and other gender specific diseases.

In consideration of the need of implementing post-graduate education on health and gender medicine for Italian physicians, FNOMCeO is cooperating with other public institutions (university, scientific societies, regional and national governments etc.) to promote an adequate post-graduated education on gender medicine.

As to the information to citizens we plan to develop the FNOMCeO website through a page dedicated to gender medicine, countering of fake news.

Moreover a new working group was set up. Its aim is to focus on the law on disabilities and to propose a revision of the indicators based on gender differences.

More clinical studies focused on gender differences could lead towards a personalised medicine and more health appropriateness and effectiveness.

The FNOMCeO Committee for Health and Gender Medicine stresses its commitment to cooperate both with other national and local health institutions and with scientific societies in order to support a gender approach and develop a fair health system to improve children’s, women’s, men’s and seniors’ health.