The Equity, Inclusion and Diversity Team is delighted to spotlight this month Kaiser Oakland Psychology Doctoral Interns Elizabeth Rivera and Elan French, who are working on a program evaluation project to support and improve services within the Multi-Specialty Transitions (MST) department.
The MST Department at Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center (see their website at: https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/care-near-you/northern-california/eastbay/departments/gender-affirming-care/) is deeply committed to providing equitable, compassionate, and high-quality medical care to transgender and gender-diverse youth, adults, and families. MST first developed a pediatric project called the “PROUD program” in February 2017 to provide gender-affirming care to children. This program aimed to address the increasing demand for services, offer a family-focused multidisciplinary approach, and meet the evolving medical guidelines of gender-affirming care (Metz & Hartman, 2019).
Now there are two types of clinics for youth within the MST Department. The PROUD clinic provides services for adolescents starting hormone replacement therapy (HRT). PROUD patients have a visit that consists of meeting with providers from mental health, social work, adolescent medicine, endocrinology, and gynecology. The GEM clinic provides follow-up care for patients who have already started HRT and for children/adolescents who are seeking to start puberty blockers. The GEM patients have a visit consisting of gynecology, endocrinology, and mental health providers.
For their program evaluation project, Elan and Elizabeth are administering two surveys to measure satisfaction with the services at the PROUD and GEM clinics. In the first survey, they are eliciting feedback from the various healthcare providers in the two clinics. The questions ask about their perceptions of patient satisfaction, strengths of the clinics, areas in need of change or further development, and suggestions for questions to ask our patients and their families that would help inform their practices. The providers’ input in the first survey will inform the second survey and assess patient satisfaction with the PROUD and GEM clinics. Elan and Elizabeth plan to administer the second survey to the patients and their families during their appointments. Descriptive statistics will be gathered to look at responses for all surveys related to provider, caregiver, and patient experiences. Open-ended responses will be reviewed for themes and reviewed with MST staff to incorporate feedback, when possible, to improve family and provider experiences.
Contributed by Mia Semelman, EID liaison, Psychology Doctoral Intern, Adult/Child CRT and Assessment Services, Kaiser Oakland
