Healthcare Allies Training
The LGBTQ+ Healthcare Allies Training seeks to provide a safe, educational environment for participants who work in a healthcare setting to engage with facilitators in order to maximize learning. Each training is led by three facilitators who either have experience providing affirming care in a medical setting, belong to an LGBTQ+ community (and therefore have experience receiving varying levels of affirming care), and/or are allies of LGBTQ+ communities. This allows clinical settings being trained to hear from a wide variety of viewpoints in order to better understand the issue, as well as learn strategies to best meet the needs of all patients.
We recognize that each healthcare setting is unique and likely has a wide range of experiences and comfort levels providing affirming healthcare to LGBTQ+ populations. Facilitators do not lecture, but rather guide the conversation while inviting participants to identify any internal biases they may have which can affect patient care.
The training is broken into three pieces:
Approximately 30 minutes of pre-training work which introduces the topic
Three hours of in-person training to dive deeper, brainstorm how to provide more affirming care, and practice scenarios that come up in a clinical setting.
Ongoing support through quarterly email updates and available one on one help to answer questions.
This training will…
Clarify common vocabulary relevant to LGBTQ+ healthcare.
Identify health disparities among these populations.
Discuss clinic-specific interactions and how to sensitively ask questions.
Review clinical scenarios and practice new skills.
Facilitate activities about microaggressions and biases and how these adversely affect patient health.
Provide resources and ongoing support.
We are happy to work with each clinical setting to set a schedule for training that works best for them – whether that be during the typical work day, during the evening or on a weekend. This is a 3 hour training, which can be offered in one 3 hour session or broken into two 1.5 hour sessions.
We also offer public trainings for anyone working in any healthcare/educational setting. Check out our calendar linked below to view upcoming public trainings! This calendar only shows trainings that are available to the public, and is not an indication of our availability to do private trainings for your staff.
If you would be interested in learning more about this training, or bringing it to your clinical setting, please contact Shawn Reagor, LGBTQ+ Allies Coordinator, at sreagor@bridgercare.org.