Building healthcare workers' confidence to work with same-sex parented families

Abstract

This article reports on a qualitative study of barriers and access to healthcare for same-sex attracted parents and their children. Focus groups were held with same-sex attracted parents to explore their experiences with healthcare providers and identify barriers and facilitators to access. Parents reported experiencing uncomfortable or anxiety-provoking encounters with healthcare workers who struggled to adopt inclusive or appropriate language to engage their family. Parents valued healthcare workers who were able to be open and honest and comfortably ask questions about their relationships and family. A separate set of focus groups were held with mainstream healthcare workers to identity their experiences and concerns about delivering equitable and quality care for same-sex parented families. Healthcare workers reported lacking confidence to actively engage with same-sex attracted parents and their children. This lack of confidence related to workers' unfamiliarity with same-sex parents, or lesbian, gay and bisexual culture, and limited opportunities to gain information or training in this area. Workers were seeking training and resources that offered information about appropriate language and terminology as well as concrete strategies for engaging with same-sex parented families. For instance, workers suggested they would find it useful to have a set of 'door opening' questions they could utilize to ask clients about their sexuality, relationship status or family make-up. This article outlines a set of guidelines for healthcare providers for working with same-sex parented families which was a key outcome of this study.

Exploring the incidence of culturally responsive communication in Australian healthcare: the first rapid review on this concept

“…The results of this review indicate that healthcare practitioners lacked confidence in their ability, skills or knowledge to achieve effective culturally responsive [36,38,40,45,48]. This resulted in many healthcare practitioners adopting a generic 'onesize-fits-all' style of communication, thereby displaying attitudes of 'cultural blindness' [12,28,34,40,50].…”

“…The perceptions of the service users indicated that healthcare practitioners style of communication was not culturally responsive [27,30,34,35,38,42,49,50]. Service users felt that healthcare practitioners presented as sceptical, authoritarian and patronising [27,42,43,49] using complicated explanation with excessive jargon [27,42,44].…”

“…The results indicated that many healthcare practitioners felt they did not receive sufficient, if any, formal training on how to achieve culturally responsive communication [12,28,30,33,[36][37][38]48]. Many healthcare practitioners presented as positive and motivated to further their education in culturally responsive communication [12,26,28,29,33,38,41,46], however did not feel supported to do so by their employer, or know where to access such training [12,33,38,41]. All the reviewed literature recommended the need for further formal training in the concept of culturally responsive care and communication, as well as requiring a reliable evaluation method to be used within services.…”

Promoting health in lesbian and bisexual women: it is not just about behaviour change

“…Von Doussa et al . () examined the strategies to build confidence in healthcare workers who work with same‐sex families and highlighted that same‐sex parents value healthcare workers who are able to comfortably ask questions about relationships or family, yet healthcare workers report the lack of confidence in working with these groups.…”

“…Problematically, spouses or partners of L&B women may not be legally considered a family member, which may restrict healthcare access or decisionmaking, and policies that allow partners to be included within healthcare choices are important in addressing this. Von Doussa et al (2016) examined the strategies to build confidence in healthcare workers who work with same-sex families and highlighted that same-sex parents value healthcare workers who are able to comfortably ask questions about relationships or family, yet healthcare workers report the lack of confidence in working with these groups.…”