The University of Louisville Medical School is launching an initiative that will add 50 hours of LGBTQ training to its curriculum to teach medical students how to best treat non-normative gender patients.
On average, medical schools train their students on LGBT-specific issues for roughly five total hours of their schooling, according to a 2011 study published in JAMA.
The Kentucky medical school, however, is seriously multiplying this number, seeking to increase those training hours ten-fold. The change comes after the university launched an “eQuality project” in 2014 which implemented the Association of American Medical Colleges‘ (AAMC) guidelines on LGBT health practices into its existing curriculum.
“I am actually part of the LGBT community,” medical student, Adam Neff said, according to Modern Healthcare. “So knowing that this kind of work was going on around training the next generation of physicians certainly made me very confident of my choice,” he said, explaining that the training was largely the reason he’d decided to attend the medical school. “Hopefully students won’t mis-gender someone or won’t use the wrong pronouns or assume a hetero-normative type of lifestyle,” Neff added.
“I think in the current national political climate people are very quick to politicize this content and to see it as an option,” said University of Louisville Medical School associate dean Dr. Amy Holthouser. “This issue is not a moral issue or a political issue; it’s about a population of patients with healthcare disparities,” she insisted.
Nonprofit LGBTQ group Campus Pride rated the University of Louisville as one of the most LGBT-friendly campuses in the nation.
No other medical school programs currently implement that many hours of LGBT training.
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