Students at Temple University School of Medicine will now have the opportunity to learn more about LGBT sexual-health issues and become better prepared to work with the LGBT community in their future careers as physicians.
This spring, Temple launched an LGBT sexual-health elective that provided med students with in-class and hands-on lessons.
The initiative, led by openly gay co-chairs Jason Duran and Betty Chernak, developed out of the pair’s observation that education on the LGBT community is lacking in most medical schools, which they discussed at a conference of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association last fall.
“Dealing with sexual health in patient interviews is a really awkward situation for incoming medical students,” said Duran. “It’s tricky enough when you’re dealing with the standard husband/wife situation, but it’s exponentially more tricky when you have someone who’s gay, transgender or adolescent.”
The pair began brainstorming how they could educate their fellow students about the complex issues LGBT patients face and proposed an elective on the topic, to which Duran said Temple was very receptive.
“What we wanted to do was start this training program so that when we’re physicians, we’re better able to deal with all types of patients. We don’t want physicians to walk into a room and be completely surprised by what a patient has to tell you and not know how to answer their questions.”
The elective, titled “Sexual Health Through Case Studies,” ran from January-March and, while it addressed broader sexual-health topics, it centered on LGBT issues.
The seven two-hour sessions included lectures on such topics as “Gender Identity vs. Sexual Identity,” “Gay Men’s Sexual Health” and “Lesbian and Women’s Sexual Health.” The students also participated in two clinical activities, one in which they shadowed employees at Temple’s Adolescent Medicine clinic and another in which they practiced patient interviews with Duran and Chernak, who role-played LGBT patients.
Drs. Robert Bettiker, Heather Clauss and Rafik Samuel, who all teach in the department of Infectious Diseases and who serve as faculty advisers of Temple’s LGBT People in Medicine — an LGBT student organization — helped write the curriculum for the program and delivered lectures. Dr. Eric Schaff, who heads Temple’s Adolescent Medicine clinic, also assisted with the portion of the course that addressed pediatrics and contraception.
Duran said many of the students enrolled in this inaugural program were LGBT themselves, and he hopes interest will spread to LGBT ally students in future semesters.
Electives in the program are typically organized by second-year medical students, and next semester, Brandon Chatani and Melisa Linskey will take the reins.
Duran said he hopes the program will continue to develop into a “think-tank” for both students and faculty members to share ideas on how best to prepare future physicians to address sexual-health issues.
He noted that while he thinks most physicians are well-intentioned, those who have never trained in this area often lack the skills necessary to provide adequate care to LGBT patients.
“A lot of doctors, especially older doctors, don’t have the training and the exposure they need on this topic,” he said. “They may have gotten in the habit of asking every guy who comes in, ‘How’s your wife?’ or ‘How’s your girlfriend?’ versus ‘Are you in a relationship?’ Open-ended questions like that allow the patients to define themselves and their sexuality. It’s about tweaking the system so that all patients feel comfortable enough to tell their doctors what they need to know. It’s all about trust.”
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].