Original ArticlesEndocrinology Fellows' Perception of Their Confidence and Skill Level in Providing Transgender Healthcare
Section snippets
INTRODUCTION
Approximately 1.4 million Americans identify as transgender (1), and many of these individuals will seek care for gender dysphoria/gender incongruence. Insurance coverage for transgender services has improved over recent years, with subsequent increased demand for providers with competence in transgender healthcare. Considering the central role of endocrinologists in treating gender dysphoria/gender incongruence, it is essential that endocrinology fellows receive the necessary training to
METHODS
The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologist hosts the annual Endocrine University, a 6-day educational course for endocrinology fellows in their final year of training. The goal of Endocrine University is to help prepare fellows for clinical practice by enhancing their exposure to key content areas that might not readily be available in fellowship training. In 2017, transgender education was added as new content. That year, 275 final year fellows attended the Endocrine University,
RESULTS
The general characteristics of responding fellows are shown in Table 1.
DISCUSSION
Endocrinologists play an integral role in the management of transgender patients (16). A 2-hour didactic case-based session provided to endocrinology fellows significantly increased their reported comfort level in managing key areas of transgender healthcare. However, despite this increase, the postsession number of fellows who felt comfortable with transgender care remained unacceptably low. Our results showed that fellows had a low baseline level of confidence in nonendocrine content areas
CONCLUSION
Our study describes the current state of transgender healthcare education from the perspective of endocrine fellows attending Endocrine University. Many fellows do not have adequate exposure to transgender health content, and for those that do, hours and content areas are suboptimal. This is concerning in the setting of rising healthcare needs of transgender patients. A didactic case-based session on transgender healthcare presented at Endocrine University significantly improved fellows'
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See accompanying article, p. 1106.