Developing LGBTQ Education for Healthcare Providers: 5 Best Practices
The LGBTQ community experiences many unique healthcare challenges, often facing acts of discrimination that make it difficult to receive equitable and safe care. As a facility leader, providing LGBTQ education for healthcare providers is an essential step toward minimizing barriers for this vulnerable patient population.
If you’re looking to provide better LGBTQ education and resources for your staff, you may be wondering where to start. In this article, we’ll go over the importance of LGBTQ education in healthcare and outline five best practices for implementing training at your facility.
The Need for LGBTQ Education for Healthcare Providers
An estimated 7 out of 10 LGBTQ individuals report having negative healthcare experiences, ranging from the outright denial of care to various forms of harassment and humiliation. Ultimately, this also leads to worsened health outcomes and makes LGBTQ individuals less likely to seek care.
The ongoing stigma that the LGBTQ community faces is caused by a number of factors — one of which is a lack of proper LGBTQ education in the healthcare space. In a survey sent out to all accredited nursing schools, nearly two-thirds of respondents indicated that their graduates were not prepared to care for LGBTQ populations.
Every individual deserves access to the healthcare that they need. In order to cultivate a more inclusive and safe environment for these patients, facility leaders play a critical role in providing LGBTQ health education resources for their staff.
LGBTQ Education for Healthcare Providers: 5 Best Practices
Now that we’ve gone over the need to foster more inclusive care environments for LGBTQ patients, here are five best practices for providing and supporting LGBTQ education at your facility.
1. Encourage the Completion of Comprehensive Training Courses
LGBTQ education requires ongoing learning of care standards and the unlearning of harmful stereotypes. It’s important to mandate baseline training and provide access to continuing education designed for providers of all levels.
Training should cover a wide range of topics, including but not limited to, sexual orientation and gender identity, reducing health disparities, and respectful communication. You can start by requiring or offering credits for continuing education opportunities on LGBTQ health. Here are a few recommended courses:
- American Medical Association’s course on LGBTQ Health, Diversity & Inclusion
- National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center’s CME/CEU courses
- National Coalition for LGBTQ Health’sLGBTQ Training Certification
2. Train Staff on Inclusive Communication
Poor communication is a common reason why LGBTQ patients often have negative experiences with healthcare providers. Thus, providing fundamental training on how to communicate with LGBTQ patients is necessary to build a better care environment.
It’s important to stay up to date on preferred terminology and ensure that your staff are not using outdated terms that may be offensive to LGBTQ patients. The National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center regularly updates an online glossary of terms. This can be a helpful resource that your providers can revisit to learn more inclusive language.
There are also many ways that staff can incorporate inclusive language in their everyday work. For example, staff should be encouraged to respectfully ask each patient about their preferred pronouns (and share their own, if comfortable) to avoid making assumptions that can harm transgender and gender nonbinary patients.
3. Include LGBTQ Topics in Routine Cultural Competence Training
LGBTQ education is an important part of building cultural competence. But, while several states mandate cultural competence training for healthcare providers, Washington, D.C. is the only jurisdiction that requires it in context to LGBTQ health.
As a facility leader, you can help break down barriers by ensuring that your routine cultural competence training includes LGBTQ health topics. Here are a few organizations that offer cultural competency training on LGBTQ populations:
4. Enforce Clinical Guidelines From Vetted Sources
It’s also important to enforce LGBTQ-specific clinical guidelines that are updated and reflective of the community’s needs. Ensure that these resources are from vetted, evidence-based organizations and make your staff aware of them. Several toolkits and guidelines can enhance LGBTQ education for healthcare providers including:
- The UCSF guidelines for the primary and gender-affirming care of transgender and gender nonbinary people.
- The Endocrine Society’s clinical guidelines for endocrine treatment of gender-dysphoric or gender-incongruent persons.
- The CDC’s guidelines on providing care for gay and bisexual men.
- National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center’s toolkit archive.
- Harvard’s library of LGBTQ health practice guidelines.
5. Implement Workflow Processes That Support Your Education
When it comes to improving LGBTQ healthcare, organizations must also ensure that workflow processes support the best practices of LGBTQ education. For example, is your patient intake form inclusive of all genders and pronouns? Does your EHR system include fields enabling sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) data collection? These are a few common (yet often overlooked) ways that LGBTQ patients can be more welcomed in the healthcare space.
Discover More Ways to Build Inclusivity
Providing LGBTQ education for healthcare providers is one of many ways to foster inclusivity and improve patient outcomes. Need help building your efforts? IntelyCare’s free newsletter can give you the expert healthcare insights you need to improve care for diverse patient populations.