The AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) has released the first guidelines for training physicians to care for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), gender nonconforming, or born with differences of sex development (DSD). Until now, there have been no formal comprehensive standards to help medical schools and health care organizations train providers in the health care needs of these patients.
“This groundbreaking publication represents a major step forward in giving medical schools, teaching hospitals, and health systems a roadmap for improving the care of LGBT and other individuals with differences in gender identity, gender expression, and sex development,” said Darrell G. Kirch, M.D., AAMC president and CEO.
People who are LGBT, gender nonconforming, or born with DSD often experience challenges when seeking care in doctors’ offices, community clinics, hospitals, and emergency rooms. These experiences, which can range from being made to feel unwelcome to outright discrimination and mistreatment, lead to poorer physical and emotional health.
The report identifies 30 competencies that physicians must master. These competencies fall under eight domains of care critical to training physicians, including patient care, knowledge for practice, practice-based learning and improvement, interpersonal and communication skills, professionalism, systems-based practice, interprofessional collaboration, and personal and professional development. This competency-based framework will allow medical educators to integrate the new guidelines into existing curricula more easily and encourage faculty and health care professionals to move away from thinking of patients in these groups as separate from the general patient population.
[For more of this story go to https://www.aamc.org/newsroom/...414490/11182014.html]
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