Caring for Transgender and Gender Diverse Prehospital Patients: A NAEMSP Position Statement and Resource Document.

Abstract

Transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people have long faced significant barriers to safely accessing medical care-especially gender-affirming care, which has been shown to strikingly improve health outcomes like suicidality and depression. In the prehospital setting, gender-affirming care amounts to showing respect for the TGD patient's identified gender and maintaining a safe environment that fosters a positive therapeutic relationship throughout the encounter. This represents a challenge for many Emergency Medical Services (EMS) systems due to the lack of TGD-specific training for EMS clinicians, a paucity of TGD-specific research to inform EMS education and clinical care, and in some cases the resistance of EMS clinicians to such training. Transgender and gender diverse people are facing a regression in legal access to essential medical care. With this position statement, NAEMSP joins other professional medical societies in providing recommendations to improve care for TGD patients, thereby affirming TGD individuals' right to exist as their authentic selves, as well as their entitlement to the same high-quality prehospital medical care as their cisgender peers.