Facilitating LGBT Medical, Health and Social Care Content in Higher Education Teaching and Postgraduate General Practice Training

Student teaching has tended to position heterosexuality and gender normativity — people conforming to social standards of what is ‘appropriate’ feminine and masculine behaviour — as the primary context in which health and illness is viewed. Models of health care that promote these views of sexuality and gender identity over others can create an environment in which gender stereotypes and heteronormativity — the cultural bias in favour of opposite-sex over same-sex sexual relationships — result in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people becoming ‘add ins’(Hicks & Watson, 2003), if and when they are considered. Even the term LGBT assumes that the Ts have co-extensive healthcare issues as with the Ls, Gs, and Bs, and can be taught together as an extension of the same theme. It is important to respond to the requirements of L, G, B, and T populations accessing health care with different models, not in the form of mainstream tolerance, but by changing institutions in lasting ways (Vaid, 1995). Obstacles to this include the lack of time and resources and the willingness and ability of faculty to teach LGBT-related curricular content. There is little medical education about LGBT issues in terms of health promotion, prevention, and care at a strategic or operational level. This is a neglected area of education that would cross several Royal College of General Practice’s and education providers’ curriculum statements in relation to diversity and human rights, where education is crucial to transforming health care for LGBT communities. However, education must not inadvertently pathologise LGBT communities by situating their associated health problems as purely LGBT health issues, whilst simultaneously showing that health inequities do affect LGBT communities in complex ways (Davy & Siriwardena, 2012). As such, this research explores barriers and facilitators of providing LGBT curricula for medical, health and social care students to help ‘mainstream’ LGBT individuals as health citizens