User:Sciencerabbit08/Healthcare and the LGBT community

Causes of LGBT health disparities
During the past decade, the LGBT social movement in United States and worldwide contributed to the increasing trend of pubic recognition and acceptance toward the community. Reports from the Institute of Medicine, US National Institutes of Health and other nonprofit organizations have called to address the gap in LGBT training and education for health care professionals. Current research indicate that LGBT individuals face disparity compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts regarding access to health facilities, qualities, and treatment outcomes. Some causes of lack of access to healthcare among LGBT people are: perceived or real discrimination, inequality in the workplace and health insurance sectors, and lack of competent care due to negligible LGBT health training in medical schools. In an online survey, 65% of health physicians heard negative comments from peers targeting LGBT patients, while 35% witnessed discrimination toward individuals in workplace. Another survey show that more than 90% of U.S. medical schools reported some hours of LGBT-specific content training in the curriculum during the pre-clinical years, while only two-thirds of schools reported in clinical years. Medical students are less likely to discriminate against LGBT patients if they can practice taking medical history from LGBT patients. Healthcare professionals working with little to no knowledge about the LGBT community can result in a lack of or a decline in the type of healthcare these families receive: "Fundamentally, the distinctive healthcare needs of lesbian women go unnoticed, are deemed unimportant or are simply ignored." Views like these lead to the belief that health care training can exclude the topic related to the healthcare of LGBT and make certain members of the LGBT community feel as though they can be exempt from healthcare without any bodily consequences.

An upstream issue is the relative lack of official data on gender identity that health policy makers could use to plan, cost, implement and evaluate health policies and programs to improve transgender population health. The 'What We Know Project' reviewed thousands of peer-reviewed studies and found a strong link between discrimination and harm to the health of LGBT people. The findings showed that the presence of discrimination, stigma, and prejudice creates a hostile social climate which increase the risk of poor mental and physical health, even for those not directly exposed to the discrimination. This creates a situation known as 'minority stress' which includes low self-esteem and expectations, fear of discrimination and internalised stigma - which all contribute to health disparities.