Back To the Main SiteBeyond Boxes: Primary Health Care
Peter Hyndal presented at a Men’s Health Conference in Newcastle, last week. A “National Health Gathering” presented by the Australasian Men’s Health Forum. For the conference he wrote a paper named Beyond boxes: Sex and gender diversity and health service provision
We’ll be posting the contents of his presentation over the next few weeks, in tasty bite sized morsels, and the full presentation (with all its references intact) will be available to download at the end of the series.
The story so far:
1 Introduction and Terms
2 What does sex and gender diversity have to do with Men’s Health?
3 Medical Professionals involvement in Making Men
Todays post, is beyond the jump:
Quality and Effectiveness of Primary Health Care
Despite the high interaction between health services and sex and gender diverse people, there is a remarkable lack of any research in relation to the quality or effectiveness of these interactions. Consistent with many findings within the Tranznation report, A Gender Agenda has also observed the following issues are commonplace:
Sex and gender diverse people tend to:
- have a general perspective of health providers as ‘gate-keepers’. This sense of a power imbalance leads to distrust and many sex and gender diverse people report that they are not always comfortable being honest with their health service providers.
- have multiple GP’s most of whom are unaware of their sex/gender status
- are often treated inappropriately in public waiting rooms and/or are subjected to humiliating and unnecessary physical examinations
- are provided with inaccurate or misleading information including being provided with pharmaceutical or surgical services without being informed of specific risks
- feel that they are often required to educate their health providers about sex/gender diversity before being able to receive health services
- have to travel interstate for common procedures because they are refused services by local doctors (this is true even from a capital city such as Canberra)
- avoid health services wherever possible because they are concerned about these issues
- be provided with inadequate and/or inappropriate health cover by Medicare and/or private health insurance (for example, Medicare will provide Testosterone under PBS for men but not women, and it will provide pap smear related rebates to women and not men. So, a person who has a cervix, but is legally male, is unable to obtain coverage to meet their needs.)
Our assumption is that most mainstream service providers want to be inclusive of sex and gender diverse people, but do not have the knowledge, skills, resources and leadership support to do so. Certainly we know that Sex and gender diversity are not usually covered in undergraduate training courses for health professionals, nor included in in-service training programs. There is little other professional development opportunities in the areas of sex and gender diversity. Organisational policies tend not to include issues for sex and gender diverse people, and there are few centres of excellence with the capacity to provide consultancy advice and support.
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The A Gender Agenda Blog » Beyond Boxes: Specific Health Issues posted on October 16, 2009:
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