Super-specialist family doctors, also with the aim of motivating young people to take up a profession that is experiencing a worrying drop in vocations, so much so that it is estimated that by 2025 around 11 million Italians could be left without a general practitioner. This is also the aim of the first master's degree in general medicine promoted by the Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome and presented yesterday. Therefore, family doctors produced by the universities who, in addition to having a dialogue on an equal footing with their specialized and hospital colleagues, are able to motivate young people who seem to be feeling a crisis in their vocation for general medicine. The National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists has in fact studied the age curve of general practitioners, with an alarming result: between 2015 and 2025, about 25,000 family doctors will retire and will not be replaced due to lack of young people doctors trained in general medicine. Which means that around 11 million Italians will be left without a family doctor, especially in the countryside or in mountain areas where services are already at a minimum.
DoctorNews – October 21, 2010
Ferruccio Fazio, Minister of Health
The new mmg? Superspecialised
The first master's degree in general medicine promoted by the Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome and presented yesterday at a press conference in Rome with the Minister of Health Ferruccio Fazio, promises a breakthrough from current general practitioner training. Today, in fact, after the normal degree course, there is no specialized university training, but the attendance of three-year courses managed by the Regions with a final paper, not comparable to a university thesis. The Master, which will be able to lead the way to other similar university initiatives, offers a further degree of preparation to those who, after the regional qualification, intend to undertake not only professional but also didactic and managerial responsibilities in the field of general medicine, with a university degree. The course is divided into 15 modules plus one address module. Among the contents that will be explored are also the risk of pandemics, nutritional education with a focus on obesity and anorexia, management of the elderly, home assistance and palliative care, prevention. But the spotlights will also be focused on the theme of the territory and multi-ethnicity, as well as on the themes of bioethics and new technologies applied to general medicine. One way, in the hope of the organizers, to make general practitioners increasingly the fulcrum of the health care system and less and less a simple "ATM" dispenser of prescriptions but also to "bridge the gap" with other European countries.
