Lecture series on gender medicine at Innsbruck and Vienna medical universities: a teaching format in comparison

Medical Students and Their Perceptions of Digital Medicine: a Question of Gender?

Digital technologies play an essential role in the medical sector of today and the future. In a cross-sectional online survey at a German medical university, male students more frequently reported keeping themselves informed about digital medicine outside of their studies across all clinical years of study. While female students self-assessed their knowledge in different fields of digital medicine as worse than their male peers in the first clinical years of study, no more gender differences could be found towards the final year. However, students of both genders showed a strong desire for further education on the topic of digital medicine.

How to Integrate Sex and Gender Medicine into Medical and Allied Health Profession Undergraduate, Graduate, and Post-Graduate Education: Insights from a Rapid Systematic Literature Review and a Thematic Meta-Synthesis

Sex and gender are concepts that are often misunderstood and misused, being utilized in a biased, preconceived, interchangeable way. Sex and gender medicine is generally overlooked, despite the profound impact of sex and gender on health outcomes. The aims of the present rapid systematic literature review were (i) to assess the extent to which sex- and gender-sensitive topics are covered in medical courses; (ii) to assess the need for and willingness toward integrating/incorporating sex and gender medicine into health-related education; (iii) to identify barriers and facilitators of the process of implementation of sex and gender medicine in medical teaching, mentoring, and training; and (iv) to evaluate the effectiveness of interventional projects targeting curriculum building and improvement for future gender-sensitive physicians. Seven themes were identified by means of a thematic analysis, namely, (i) how much sex- and gender-based medicine is covered by medical courses and integrated into current medical curricula, (ii) the knowledge of sex and gender medicine among medical and allied health profession students, (iii) the need for and willingness toward acquiring sex- and gender-sensitive skills, (iv) how to integrate sex- and gender-based medicine into medical curricula in terms of barriers and facilitators, (v) existing platforms and tools to share knowledge related to sex and gender medicine, (vi) sex- and gender-based medicine aspects in the post-medical education, and (vii) the impact of sex- and gender-sensitive topics integrated into medical curricula. Based on the identified gaps in knowledge, further high-quality, randomized trials with larger samples are urgently warranted to fill these gaps in the field of implementation of gender medicine in educating and training future gender-sensitive physicians.