Health Care Provision to Transgender Individuals; Understanding Clinician Attitudes and Knowledge Acquisition

• Main Author: Kline, Leo Isaac
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: ScholarWorks @ UVM 2015
• Subjects: Barriers to Health Care; Gender Dysphoria; Gender Identity Disorder; Transgender Health; Nursing
• Online Access: http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/338; http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1337&context=graddis

The Institute of Medicine report of 2011 defined Transgender Specific Health Needs as one of four priority research areas. While there is research asserting that health care providers (HCPs) do not have adequate training in providing competent care to transgender patients, there are no studies to date assessing HCPs' gender identity attitudes and their willingness to learn the Standards of Care (SOC) developed for this patient population. According to the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, as of 2010, 52% of Nurse Practitioners (NPs) were practicing in primary care settings. As more than half of NPs practice in primary care and transgender patients often initially present their gender concerns to their primary care provider, this study focuses on the NP population. This study describes a sample of NPs' attitudes towards gender variance, as well as their perceived need and interest in learning the SOC as published by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Multi-state purposive sampling of NP professional organizations was conducted. Two conservative and two progressive states' professional organizations were included in the sample. The states were randomly assigned within both geopolitical groups to intervention or control with the use of a random numbers table. Comparisons between geopolitical groups and between control and intervention groups cannot be made due to low response rates of all states. The majority of this small sample of NPs agreed that they needed and wanted additional training in transgender health care. Future research with representative sample sizes is needed to better understand provider-sided barriers to caring for this marginalized patient population.