Building Competency in Gender Inclusive Healthcare: An Innovative Virtual Curriculum

ABSTRACT

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the health care and education systems on all fronts safely providing care for patients, restructuring how care is delivered, and rapidly innovating to deliver stimulating medical education via tele-technology. The pandemic also highlighted multiple health disparities, resulting in an urgent call to action to promote health equity. In response to these challenges, the New York State (NYS) Clinical Education Initiative (CEI) Sexual Health Center of Excellence developed a video-based educational curriculum entitled, “Building Blocks for Trans & Gender Diverse Care.” The curriculum aims to guide clinical providers to create a practice space for delivering care that is gender affirming and inclusive. Methods: The curriculum provides a quick, easy to access, graduated learning experience that engages learners at multiple levels. Content includes foundational concepts and terminology, creating inclusive healthcare spaces and non-stigmatizing encounters. It also offers clinical guidance and pearls related to the gender transition process. The curriculum was unveiled at the 7th Annual NYS Sexual Health Conference, and then shared on the CEI YouTube channel where it is presented as 3 episodes, broken into 12 parts, each 5 to 18 minutes long. The YouTube link has been shared on multiple clinician listservs, with an international subscriber base. The link is also available on the employee learning and performance platform used by a major academic medical center. By disseminating through multiple access points, we aim to build awareness and competence to a broader audience. Utilization of YouTube enables our team to assess curriculum usage by tracking numbers of views and learner comments. Beginning in October 2021, the curriculum will also be accessible on the open source CEI website for free Continuing Education (CE) credits, both medical and nursing. As with all curricula on the CEI website, demographic information regarding viewers and evaluation feedback are collected. Results: Preliminary results reveal that between 6/29/21 and 9/9/21, the videos have been viewed 871 times through the CEI YouTube channel. The consensus feedback received (verbal comments, responses to listserv posts) has been overwhelmingly positive. Access to CE accredited videos will open on Oct 1, 2021. Information regarding number of views, completion of the entire 3 part series, demographics of viewers (profession, age/race/ethnicity practice specialty, practice location) will be reported along with quantitative and qualitative evaluation results. Conclusions: An accessible, short educational video curriculum has been well-received and easily disseminated via the Internet during an initial marketing rollout. It has the potential to build competence broadly among clinicians to provide an affirming and inclusive healthcare experience for transgender and gender diverse patients. The video format is particularly appropriate during a pandemic, when in-person engagement has been challenging in both patient care and continuing education activities. Sources of Support New York State AIDS Institute, Clinical Education Initiative.