Medical students’ awareness of health issues, attitudes, and confidence about caring for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender patients: a cross-sectional survey

BACKGROUND: Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) patients have an increased incidence of a range of health problems, and face many barriers to accessing healthcare. Our research aimed to explore the awareness of health issues and attitudes of medical students towards LGBT patients’ health including barriers to health services, their attitudes towards inclusion of LGBT content in the curriculum and their confidence with providing care for their LGBT patients in the future. METHODS: Medical students were recruited to take part in a cross-sectional survey. We used a 28-item survey to explore views about the undergraduate medical curriculum. RESULTS: 252 surveys were analysed from 776 eligible participants. Attitudes towards LGBT patients were positive but awareness and confidence with respect to LGBT patients were variable. Confidence discussing sexual orientation with a patient significantly increased with year of study but confidence discussing patient gender identity did not. The majority of participants (n = 160; 69%) had not received specific training on LGBT health needs, and 85% (n = 197) wanted to receive more training. CONCLUSIONS: Increasing the amount of LGBT teaching in undergraduate medical curricula could help to increase the quality of doctor-patient interactions, to facilitate patients’ disclosure of sexual orientation and gender identity in healthcare and increase the quality of healthcare.