The Remedy by Zena Sharman

The Remedy by Zena Sharman

Author:Zena Sharman [Sharman, Zena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2016-10-24T04:00:00+00:00


QUEER AND TRANS HEALTH INNOVATION PROFILE

The Trans Buddy Program (Nashville, Tennessee)

Kale Edmiston, PhD, Co-Founder, and Lauren Mitchell, PhD, Co-Director

Tell us about the Trans Buddy Program and why you’re proud of it.

The Trans Buddy Program pairs trained peer advocates with transgender people seeking health care at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) in Nashville. Our volunteers are a diverse and committed group of cis- and transgender people who provide emotional and logistical support to transgender people accessing health care, while facilitating communication between patients and providers.

Because VUMC is a regional leader in health care, we often serve people from across the southeast. Our clients have included adolescents navigating the coming-out process and elder transwomen from rural Tennessee.

What changes are you trying to create? What problems are you trying to solve? What does success look like?

The Trans Buddy Program is improving the health of transgender people by providing a supportive advocate to patients who might otherwise avoid health care. Because many transgender people avoid care due to fears of discrimination and heightened anxiety about medical encounters, Trans Buddy helps reassure patients by putting them in touch with experienced providers, helping them navigate the health care system, and empowering them to become their own self advocates. Our program addresses a lack in an overextended medical system by modeling compassionate care for patients who are often underserved. We alleviate pressure on both sides of the medical visit: for patients, and for doctors and medical staff. For us, success means that an individual patient utilizes our service, then feels empowered enough to advocate for their own health without us.

If someone from another place emailed you to say, “I want to do this in my community,” and asked for your advice on how to do it, what would you tell them?

Make sure to have local transgender leadership that has ties to diverse communities on the ground. If program leadership is not connected to the local transgender community, the program will not be utilized by the people who could benefit from it. It is also critical to have relationships with local providers and the support of a health care institution, such as a clinic or hospital.

If the Trans Buddy Program was gifted $1 million (with no strings attached) by a donor, and your success was completely guaranteed, what would you choose to do?

We would start by compensating our wonderful, dedicated volunteers. Then we would hire a diverse trans-identified staff of administrators, clinicians, and social workers to support our missions of outreach, patient care, research, and education. This would include mandatory transgender cultural humility and medical competency training for all providers and staff at our institution, made widely available online, as well as increased outreach to poor, rural, and people-of-colour communities in the Greater Nashville area. We would start a once-a-week “Trans Night” clinic for primary/preventive care in a supportive environment and implement a research project to determine health outcomes for transgender people who utilize Trans Buddy, with an emphasis on adherence, self-efficacy and mental health, and quality of life.



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