Source/Disclosures
Treharne GJ, et al. family practice. 2022;doi:10.1093/fampra/cmac005.
Disclosures: The researchers do not report relevant financial disclosures.
Transgender people who said they received supportive primary care were more likely to report better mental health, according to survey results published in family practice.
However, only about half of the transgender people who participated in the survey said they had primary care doctors who supported them.
“The findings of this study reinforce the urgent need to provide gender-affirming services and routine primary care for transgender people,” Ron Carroll, Doctor, wrote a general practitioner and senior lecturer at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and colleagues.
The study included 948 transgender people aged 14 to 83 in New Zealand who completed the 2018 Counting Ourselves poll. Participants were recruited through connections made with transgender community groups and social media postings. They were asked two sets of questions about their health care experiences, one about negative health care experiences and the other about experiences with supportive PCPs, as well as questions about nonsuicidal self-harm and suicidal ideation.
Based on the results, only about 57% of participants reported feeling treated the same way as other patients when seeing PCPs for non-transgender health care needs. A lower proportion, 48.2%, said their PCPs were supportive of their needs for gender-affirming care.
Negative health care experiences were associated with higher rates of psychological distress, nonsuicidal self-harm, and suicidality, while positive experiences were associated with lower psychological distress and nonsuicidal self-harm, according to Carroll and colleagues. Each additional support experience with a PCP resulted in an 11% reduction in the likelihood of a suicide attempt, while each negative health care experience was associated with a 20% increase in the likelihood of a suicide attempt.
Additionally, 47% of participants reported having to educate a health care provider to obtain appropriate care, and about 43% said their PCP was willing to educate themselves about gender-affirming care. Less than a quarter of participants said their PCPs knew much about gender-affirming care.
carroll He said PCPs don’t need to be experts in transgender health care, but “they need to understand some basics and then be respectful.”
“If you don’t know something, tell the patient, ‘I’m not very familiar with that, but I’ll find out,’” she told Healio.
The findings of this study confirm the need for PCPs to support the health care of transgender people, according to Carroll.
“If we can try to create positive and supportive experiences, even if we don’t know all the answers, it seems like it will be beneficial for people’s mental health,” he said.
Transgender health care is not routinely taught in general practice training in New Zealand, and the level of training and education PCPs obtain may be lower than in other countries, Carroll said. She suggests transgender people work alongside PCPs as teachers.
“Have community members help with some of the more vivid experiences,” Carroll said. – by Allison Flynn Becker
References:
LGBTQ+ Health Updates
