The team at Alstonville Clinic recently took on Primary Care Impact quality improvement activity, Improving general practice engagement with transgender and gender diverse people to deliver inclusive and gender affirming healthcare to their patients.
This is an important QI activity as the needs of the transgender, gender diverse and non-binary (TGDNB) people are an important aspect of delivering patient centred care in general practice. Negative experiences within primary care can lead to future hesitation in accessing medical care.
The team at Alstonville Clinic worked together to create impactful changes to help improve the way they deliver gender affirming healthcare to their patients and community.
Some of the actions taken by the clinic included:
- social Worker from ACON presenting an education session on transgender health, diversity and respectful communication (ACON provides this training free of charge for practices, you can find more details on our Primary Care Impact page).
- changes to the language used across teams to be more inclusive.
- reviewed new patient form to include sex and gender separately (**The latest edition of the RACGP Standards for General Practice (5th edition) recommends that health professionals separate the collection of sex and gender information. See Primary Care Impact activity, Improve collection and recording of gender identity).
- team exploration of appropriate referral pathways.
‘This has been a very worthwhile experience,’ said Helen Rankin Jarvie, Alstonville Clinic’s Practice Manager.
‘The social worker from ACON, AJ Jensen, led an open discussion on trans and gender diverse healthcare needs and left us with a range of educational information and resources which have been very useful.
‘Our GPs now feel they are better able to support and assist our gender diverse patients in what is often a very challenging time in their lives.’
You can view Alstonville Clinic’s PDSA via the quality improvement page, Improving general practice engagement with transgender and gender diverse people. Well done to the team at Alstonville Clinic!
Visit Primary Care Impact today to begin your next quality improvement initiative.
Mid and North Coast Localised Pathways
Username: manchealth
Password: conn3ct3d
Transgender Health and Gender Diversity pathway.