Medical Students’ Exposure to Urology in European Medical Schools: Historical Review and Current Proposals

The Bolonia convergence programme will be finished in 2010. The objective is to standardise the teaching programme of all European medical faculties and thus distribute the 500 credits of the medical curricula in a similar way in all countries. Most proposals for this project come from basic science (first cycle), internal medicine (second cycle), and emerging new disciplines. For the moment, we are not aware of any proposal coming from urological representatives. We suppose that urology professors all around Europe are reporting their opinions and suggestions to their local deans, who will reach the academic authorities through the Deans Conference for a final consensus programme. Several academic institutions are simultaneously collaborating on this project and educational challenge. We considered that the European Academy of Urology could and should have an important role as an active collaborator on this project to bring a global European perspective with a more realistic approach. If the main objective of medical school is to form good doctors and excellent clinicians, the opinion of the urologists in daily clinical practice, who care for referred patients or share care of urological patients with general practitioners, would be exceedingly important. Their perspective should help to define the basic urological knowledge that a