The importance of including femalegenital mutilation into medical education : A qualitative study on Swedish universities midwifery program

Sammanfattning: This thesis will investigate to what extent the midwifery programme atselected Swedish universities is including the issue of female genitalmutilation (FGM) into their education and curriculum. This is an importantsubject to do research on since a lot of existing literature on the topic showsthat midwives in Sweden are seriously lacking in knowledge regarding thepractice of FGM. According to a study done by Tamaddon et al. (2006) lessthan 30% of the Swedish midwives believed that they had adequateknowledge of FGM. Another study of the issue of FGM showed thatSwedish midwives felt that their knowledge of FGM was lacking and that itwas a marginalized issue on their place of work (Widmark et al. 2002).The reason to why the focus of my research will be on midwifery studentsand teachers within the midwifery program is because the healthprofessionals who is most likely to meet circumcised women are midwives.According to Dawson et al. (2015) “Midwives are often the first providerswomen will see for their maternal health needs and therefore play a criticalrole in providing quality care and preventing the practice” (Dawson et al.2015 p 230).The chosen research topic fits smoothly into the broader peace anddevelopment area due to what has been mentioned earlier, the increase inpeople movement in the world today makes some issues a global challenge.Which has been the case of the practice of FGM, it is now time to understandthat this is no longer an issue only in the countries were FGM is traditionallypracticed, it is an issue and especially a challenge even in high incomecountries.The method to be used in this research is semi-structured interviews with acareful sampling process of participants, done by a purposive sampling. Itwill be a qualitative study based on a cross-sectional design.