Healthcare professional education programme

The infrastructure for Nordic clinicians to acquire credentialled women’s health competence through institutionally anchored programmes connected to clinical authority and embedded in national workforce planning, across specialists, general practitioners, nurses, and midwives. Today, this infrastructure is uneven. Nordic clinicians currently treat women’s health conditions without sex-differentiated training in cardiovascular disease, without dedicated women’s health competence credentials in most countries, and without a pan-Nordic talent layer. The burden falls on individual practitioners to compensate for systemic gaps.

NKTEA at Oslo University Hospital is the institutional model, a national competence service for endometriosis and adenomyosis that trains four to six clinicians annually through a three-module curriculum. Karolinska Institutet’s 7.5-credit Menopause Expertise for Midwives is the credentialled non-specialist analogue. Karolinska’s Menstrual Health – A Life Cycle Perspective course, running since 2025, extends the credentialled non-specialist track upstream of menopause and across the reproductive life course.

Combining the NKTEA institutional pattern with a Karolinska-style credentialled non-specialist programme, and extending both to female cardiovascular disease as the most under-served condition, would let the Nordics produce trained clinicians at the scale the disease burden requires. The five national health authorities, Socialstyrelsen, Sundhedsstyrelsen, Helsedirektoratet, Duodecim, and Landlæknir, together with Karolinska Institutet, Oslo University Hospital and NKTEA, and NFOG, are the natural coordinators.