WASHINGTON — Strides are being made in the world of LGBT health care despite a hostile presidential administration, Human Rights Campaign officials write in their annual Healthcare Equality Index.
Among the strides: more than half of Index participants now have written gender-transition guidelines; 75 percent of hospitals surveyed offer trans-inclusive benefits — an eight percentage point increase over last year, and numbers that bring them on par with their corporate counterparts, as measured by HRC's 2019 Corporate Equality Index.
There was also a 35 percent increase in training hours recorded — clocking in at more than 94,000 hours of LGBTQ care training provided; and a 60 percent increase in the number of Index participants whose electronic health records capture a patient's sexual orientation, and a 40 percent increase in the number of Index participants whose electronic health records capture a patient's gender identity.
Of the 1,000 hospitals that did not actively participate in the Index but were included based on HRC Foundation research, only 67 percent have patient non-discrimination policies that include both sexual orientation and gender identity, and only 62 percent were found to have an LGBTQ-inclusive employment non-discrimination policy. The equal visitation policy, in place at 90 percent of facilities that did not actively participate, is the only aspect in which this group comes close to matching the rate of the participating facilities, HRC officials said.
A record 680 health care facilities actively participated in this year's survey.
This article originally appeared in the Washington Blade and is made available in partnership with the National LGBT Media Association.
