Medical Schools Falls Short on LGBT Education September 7, 2011 News, Primary Care, Public Health, SFMS Member, UCSF JAMA, LGBT education, LGBT health, medical school 0 Medical students spend hours learning about human health, behavior and how to provide good patient care. But when it comes to caring for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals, their training may fall short. According to a new survey of medical school deans in the U.S. and Canada, schools spent a median of just five hours teaching LGBT-related health content. Some 33 percent provided no LGBT-related instruction during students’ clinical years, which is when students receive the most hands-on training, and nearly 4 percent of schools reported not covering LGBT health at all. More than a quarter of the medical school deans said their school’s coverage of 16 related topics was “poor” or “very poor.” The topics included sex change surgery, mental health issues and HIV-AIDS. While nearly all medical schools taught students to ask patients if they “have sex with men, women or both” while obtaining a sexual history, the overall curriculum lacked deeper instruction to help “students carry that conversation as far as it needs to go,” said lead author Dr. Juno Obedin-Maliver of the University of California, San Francisco. Without such education, doctors are left guessing and can make faulty assumptions, Obedin-Maliver said. For instance, lesbians need Pap tests, which screens for the sexually spread virus that causes most cervical cancer, as often as heterosexual women do. But some doctors assume they don’t need them. Click here to read the JAMA study. Comments are closed.
