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Italy is a country of 60 million citizens with a high life expectancy, an increasing prevalence of chronic multi-morbidity and a public healthcare system. There are 61 medical schools and more than one thousand postgraduate programs for 50 different specialisations. In this article, we describe the Italian medical educational system and its most recent evolution towards a process of internationalization, alongside pedagogical and cultural changes. The main challenges are in the process of students' selection, which is still only based on the assessment of basic knowledge, and in the reform of the post-graduate education, which lacks an official, formal definition of the learning outcomes and the aligned methods of assessment. The opportunities come from the increasing awareness of the importance of faculty development programs. The pandemic itself acted as a catalyst of innovation, pushing toward more student-centered teaching-learning activities. Finally, an increase in international collaborations in medical education research could be effective to foster the development of medical education in the country.

This article is dedicated to evaluating the impact of Faculty Development for the introduction of Problem Based Education in higher education. A bachelor's science degree program in Animal Care at the University of Padua has decided to introduce Problem Based Learning in an entire semester, as a first propaedeutic attempt at transforming the entire educational pathway. The transformation process was made possible by several elements: a Faculty Development program that allowed teachers to approach the PBL method and the creation of a Community of Practice (CoP) among the teachers. A preliminary evaluation of the impact of the Faculty Development program was conducted and the article describes some results: Faculty Development initiatives were effective, participants learned meaningfully, and enjoyed formal and in group training activities. Participants increased their motivation to teach according to the PBL approach for an entire semester. Participants were also motivated to create some Faculty Learning Communities (FLC), a special type of CoP in which Faculty members learn informally in group.

BACKGROUNDː There is an increasing emphasis on humanized care in obstetric and midwifery practice. The goal of this paper is to investigate if and how medical humanities content was present in the undergraduate medical syllabus and how similar or different this is from the undergraduate midwifery program in italy. METHODSː A review of the 2017-18 curriculum for Italian Schools of Medicine and of Midwifery was carried out through institutional websites or mailing requests. The following details were collected for each program: the type of humanities content; the academic credits allocated, whether it was taught as a stand-alone (independent) topic or not, and the year(s) of the program when it was provided. RESULTSː Programs were included for 39 Schools of Medicine and 36 Schools of Midwifery. All midwifery schools included at least one subject with humanities content. Five medical schools (12.9) did not appear to have any subjects in this area. Psychology and ethics/bioethics were the most frequently found topics in both disciplines, but, apart from history of medicine, midwifery was much more likely than medicine to include other humanities topics, and especially pedagogy, anthropology, sociology and communication studies, philosophy and cross-cultural studies were rarely or never included in either discipline. CONCLUSIONSː A greater breadth of humanities studies was included in midwifery schools. However, their relative importance appears to be low, given the low level of academic credits and lack of presence as independent subjects.