Bioethics teaching in Italian Medical Degree Programs (MDP): an overview

The systematic integration of ethical and humanistic dimensions into medical education in Italy has progressively strengthened since the late 1990s. However, no studies currently provide an up-to-date and comprehensive mapping of the teaching of bioethics within Italian Medical Degree Programs (MDPs). To provide a complete and systematic overview of bioethics courses included in the MDPs offered by Italian universities. Using the official list of Italian universities published by the Ministry of Universities and Research, a manual review of the institutional websites of all universities offering MDPs – whether taught in Italian or English – was conducted. Only mandatory courses containing at least one of the following keywords in their title were included: bioetica, etica, morale (Italian) or bioethics, ethics, moral (English). Elective courses were excluded. A subsequent manual search of publicly available online sources was carried out to verify the consistency between each course instructor’s academic degree and the Scientific-Disciplinary Sector (SSD) of the course. The reference academic year was 2025–2026. A substantial portion of the examined curricula (~ 71%) included courses in ethics or bioethics. With the exception of three atypical cases, these courses were predominantly assigned to two medical SSDs – Legal Medicine and History of Medicine – while a smaller share (~ 18%) was assigned to Moral Philosophy. An overall consistency of approximately 78% was observed between the SSD and the academic degree of the instructors. In light of the distinction introduced by the “Gelmini reform” between bibliometric and non-bibliometric sectors, 81% of bioethics courses are placed within bibliometric areas. This placement effectively locates bioethics within the scientific domain of knowledge, raising questions about the implications of such classification for the identity and development of a discipline that is inherently interdisciplinary.