After almost four years of undergraduate students asking for a course on LGBTQ+ health issues, New York University (NYU) Rory Meyers College of Nursing revealed the course would be offered as an elective for the fall semester.
According to Them, the course will cover the “history of LGBTQ+ health, endemic physical and mental health issues, and significant laws and policies that govern care for LGBTQ+ people.”
The professor over the course will be Clinical Assistant Professor Jeff Day, who nursing students initially approached with the idea of implementing LGTBQ+ health education. Day is also a nurse practitioner student at Mt. Sinani’a Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery.
“While ideally LGBTQ+ content would be woven throughout the entire nursing curriculum, we recognized that this amount of change takes time,” Day said in the announcement, “so we developed an elective course to help fill the gap in LGBTQ+ educational content.”
He said the students expressed high interest in this course because of the barriers members in the LGBTQ+ community face regarding healthcare, such as discrimination.
However, nurses get little to no training on LGBTQ+ health issues. A 2015 national survey of more than 1,000 nursing school faculty shows that around two hours was the median time to teach nursing students about LGBTQ+ health.
“It is rare for nursing schools to offer coursework dedicated to the health and well-being of LGBTQ+ individuals, despite the unique issues they face and growing interest from students,” said Day, according to Fierce Healthcare. “Our goal is to empower new nurses to provide care for people across sexual orientations and gender expressions that promotes health and improves patient outcomes.”
His long-term goal with the course is to offer a clinical simulation. This will allow the nursing students to practice real-life scenarios with trained professionals.