Why Sexual Health?
Why Trauma Informed Care?
Because the world is big and painful and traumatic and full of sickness. Because medicine requires so much of us while giving so few resources. Because it's hard to take care of people. Because so often the world doesn't take care of us.
In my professional work as a case manager and a nurse, so much of what I offer is comfort. Allowing someone to be touched gently, to be cared for, to be listened to, to be offered the opportunity to say yes or no, and to be respected. These skills are perhaps the most transferable in all of medicine. They form the foundation of a practice that reaps more than the physical care it sows.
Learning how to speak gently and respectfully about difficult topics is not taught well in nursing or medical or PA programs. Yet nearly every provider will have to do so at some point in their career. Even if sexuality is not a core component of your practice, it's principles can inform how you approach every other topic in medicine. It can also pay dividends to a number of pragmatic elements of your medical practice:
- Early detection of sexual health problems before disease progression leading to lower patient healthcare utilization, reduced need for specialist cross-coordination, and quicker time-to-resolution
- Decrease loss-to-care and patient no-shows with trauma-informed, culturally competent care that builds patient-provider relationships
- Up your patient satisfaction scores, which are used to calculate Medicare reimbursement rates
- Proactively reduce Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints related to sexual or gender identity concerns by creating a welcoming and inclusive staff environment
- Increase your organization’s HRC equality index score, which promotes LGBT friendly businesses and can increase client and staff hiring bases
- Reduce unnecessary medical testing due to patients withholding information from practitioners
- Reduce treatment-seeking delay among OB/GYN and sexual health clients, leading to better patient health outcomes and reduced costs for treatment
