Introduction

The results in Part 1 conclude that the experiences of older LGBTI people point to serious shortcomings when it comes to being treated with knowledge and respect in the healthcare system. This leads to rights violations, invisibility, the wrong treatment and, in the worst case, to their refraining from seeking help. The purpose of the knowledge inventory in Part 2 is to investigate these experiences by looking at the knowledge and competence about LGBTI people’s living conditions and gender and sexuality norms that exist in both health and social sciences study programmes and among healthcare and social care staff in the Nordic countries. In this part, we will look at:

The knowledge inventory is based primarily on relevant research from the literature searches made in this study, and relevant reports and other grey material from supplementary searches. The reports that we learned about during the process of compiling and writing this report have also been included. All publications included are listed in Appendix 2. For this sub-study, we searched for scholarly works that analysed health and social sciences professional qualification study programmes, and professional practice and CPD in relation to gender, sexuality, norms and above all LGBTI perspectives on ageing. The searches showed that very few studies have been carried out in which older LGBTI people are included in relation to professional qualification study programmes or professional practice. A majority of the studies focused on ‘all’, on children/young people, or on adult LGBTI people in their interactions with the healthcare system in relation to reproduction and family building. We have also included studies that are not age-specific in addition to those that specifically focus on interactions with older adult LGBTI people.

The analysis has been supplemented with contextualising material; policy documents that regulate national intended learning outcomes for relevant professional qualification study programmes at university level, and interviews and e-mail interviews with university employees and CPD actors (see Appendix 4). CPD courses are the channel through which many staff without formal education gain knowledge, for example in the home care service and elder care. CPD courses on LGBTI-related themes are essential for professionals who have completed higher education because of the large knowledge deficit in this area.

Since a majority of the research comes from Sweden and Norway, interviews have mainly been conducted with relevant individuals in Iceland, Denmark and Finland, as well as the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland. The primary aim of the interviews was to gain a deeper understanding of patterns that emerged in the literature study, and to provide a picture of the situation in the countries in which no literature was found. The informants were sought using the snowball method, via the researcher’s contact networks and via the LGBTI organisations in each country.