Your Certs Please.

A discussion is going on with healthcare providers about training therapists, endocrinologists, and other health providers. Some are asking for a certification program while others are balking over the idea.

We as a community have been complaining that we don’t want to have to training our doctors when we go in for healthcare and have been saying we need more healthcare providers for our hormones and other medical needs. Well the healthcare providers have been listening and have started to offer certification for medical professionals. I know of two seminars this year that are offering certifications, one is in Chicago and other is in Boston. The Boston conference…

Transgender Health Conference
Join us at Fenway Health’s Transgender Health Conference, October 2-3, 2015, for an educational program for health care providers and members of health care teams in community health centers, safety-net organizations and student health clinics. Local and nationally-recognized experts in the field will lead participants through the fundamentals of providing high-quality, compassionate care for transgender people. The conference is co-sponsored with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers.

Hosted at Fenway Health’s beautiful ten-story health center overlooking Fenway Park, this conference is produced by our team of medical, mental health, and health research experts. The conference program includes foundational material for all members of health care teams as well as specialized content for both medical and behavioral health care providers.

Conference topics will include:

• Gender Affirmative Health Care: Terminology, Demographics, and Epidemiology
• Gender Identity Development
• Cross Sex Hormone Treatment & Therapy
• Gender Affirming Psychotherapy
• Models of Care
• Working with Children and Families

This is what we have been looking for! Hopefully we will have more healthcare providers that will help us.

But…

You know there always is a “but.”

The worry is that insurance providers will only accept letters for hormones, surgery, and other medical treatments from certified healthcare providers. We do not want this to happen!

I think you all can see the drawbacks to requiring certified therapists to get our hormones, what if there are no certified therapist in your area? Will you be expected to travel 30, 40, or even 50 miles to a certified doctor? How long of a wait will you have to get an appointment? There are a little more than a handful of endo her in Connecticut that provide hormones to us and the wait to get an appointment is almost six months.

Will our next battle be fighting insurance companies over certs for healthcare providers?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens