Classes are now in full swing at area universities, and students from the area — and around the world — interested in the LGBT health arena will soon have a new option for their studies.
Drexel University is this fall launching a Certificate in LGBT Health, which organizers say is the very first its kind across the globe.
The three-course certificate program is designed for graduate students and practicing health-care professionals. It will be conducted online with a classroom component for Drexel students.
Enrollment is now open, and any student who holds a bachelor’s degree is eligible to apply. Classes will begin at the end of the month.
Dr. Randall Sell, director of Drexel’s Program for LGBT Health, under the School of Public Health, said the certificate program will close gaps in LGBT health education.
“I’ve been in public health for a long time and these are the type of courses you can’t get anywhere else,” he said. “If you talk to most practitioners who specialize in LGBT health, they taught themselves everything they know. I have two doctorates and I never was able to be a part of something like this. There may have been classes here and there — a course on HIV or an overview of LGBT health — but never has there been an actual program. It’s embarrassing, to be truthful, and really shocking.”
Last academic year, Drexel launched a program piloting the certificate classes but only one was offered each quarter and not in a formal program.
Sell said the program could be a boon for a wide range of people — mainstream medical personnel looking to enhance their understanding of LGBT issues, those who work with LGBT populations or young professionals eager to have experiences to set them apart.
The inaugural courses will cover LGBT heath concerns, which Sell said will range from cancer-related topics to health-care access; the intersection between LGBT identities and other identities, and the impact of those relationships on health outcomes; and LGBT health research, exploring how traditional research models are modified to examine LGBT populations.
The online format of the program is as innovative as its content, Sell said.
“This isn’t the traditional structure that we have at universities, but this allows you to go beyond that and bring people together in ways that you couldn’t before. In a classroom, everyone is located in one place but, with LGBT people, not everyone is neighbors with each other, so this allows us to bring diversity together.”
Sell said he envisions the program becoming an internationally recognized entity.
“There is exciting possibility for international collaboration among students,” he said. “Students learn not just from a professor dictating in a classroom but from one another. Students at the graduate level bring a wealth of experience to a course and that’s when you can have those ah-ha moments. That’s going to be really exciting to see — when people from so many different places can come together and have those moments.”
A number of Drexel students have already signed up for the program, and Sell said he anticipates the online program will be in full swing by the winter quarter.
Sell will be the primary instructor for the fall, but said a number of LGBT and ally professors involved with the university’s Program for LGBT Health plan to delve in later.
“We really have the expertise here at Drexel, that’s one of the main reasons we decided to do this,” he said. “In some places, classes on LGBT topics are led by professors not because they have an expertise in the area, but because they themselves are gay or lesbian. In our program, we have a number of qualified faculty who are a great mix of LGBT and straight. It is time for this and we had the expertise available. Someone needed to start this so we don’t have another generation of students having to teach themselves about LGBT health.”
For more information, visit www.publichealth.drexel.edu/lgbthealth/.