Project “Men, women and medicine” at the medical faculty Düsseldorf

The project „Men, Women and Medicine“ is an initiative to develop the curriculum at the medical faculty of the HHU, lead by medical sociologist Dr. Simone Weyers and the equal opportunities officer Dr. Anja Vervoorts. In February 2013 they already founded a working group for gender medicine with teaching representatives for different subjects to start this project. With funding from the KomDiM (Centre of Competence Development for Diversity Management in Studies and Teaching at Universities in NRW) and with the help of health psychologist Miriam Engels the project could be followed up professionally. The focus lies on different needs of men than of women in diagnosis, therapy and prevention of diseases.

In the past, gender medicine was scattered in the education of young medical students and was often limited to biological aspects (sex differences). In the course of the project (January 2014 to December 2014) a concept was developed how to include gender sensitive contents in the teaching. For this purpose, a competence based learning goal catalogue was constructed and used in an internal poll to identify what was already taught in the curriculum implicitly and which learning goals needed to be added. The results showed a demand for an introduction into the topic during the first terms that will be covered with additional seminars in the second study year. The teaching instrument “Geschlechterbrille“ (Gender Lens) was developed for this purpose.
The original working group has expanded to a network “Men, women and medicine” in the beginning of 2015 to continue promoting the topic across faculties.