Category Archives: health
LGBT Health Care Equality Index
HRC Foundation’s Healthcare Equality Index and the Future of LGBT-Inclusive Care
October 15, 2014 by Beth Sherouse, ACLS Public Fellow, HRC Senior Content Manager
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The Human Rights Campaign Foundation released its annual Healthcare Equality Index (HEI) today, with some significant changes from last year. For the first time, our Health and Aging Program team proactively researched hospitals that chose not to participate — significantly increasing awareness of how hospitals are treating LGBT patients and employees across the United States. We featured an additional 640 hospitals — which we researched but didn’t participate.
“In the past, if someone needed to find an LGBT-friendly hospital and there wasn’t an HEI participant nearby, they might be out of luck,” said Tari Hanneman, associate director of the Health and Aging Program. “We tried to fill in those gaps this year, so even if a facility isn’t meeting all of our standards, at least LGBT patients and employees know what to expect and where to start.”
We also hope that our attempts to engage the hospitals we researched will lead them to participate in the HEI in the future. This year’s HEI included a record 507 active participants, including 48 hospitals that we researched that accepted our invitation to participate in the HEI survey. Of the 507 active participants, 426 earned “Leader in LGBT Healthcare Equality” status, including 34 of the hospitals that were originally part of the research group.
Another new feature of this year’s HEI is a Google Maps lookup feature that allows people to search for HEI-rated facilities based on their location, making it even easier for people to find LGBT-inclusive care more quickly and easily.
As with HRC Foundation’s other reports and indices, the 2014 HEI isn’t the end of our efforts to encourage providers to adopt best practices for LGBT employees, patients and their families. Next year, we plan to add even more researched hospitals to our list. And we expect many of our researched hospitals this year to participate fully next year.
In addition to adding more proactively-researched hospitals, we will also expand next year’s trainings and best practices — with an increased focus on HIV/AIDS. Stigma against people living with HIV and AIDS is still something that keeps many HIV-positive LGBT people from getting the patient-centered care they need and deserve.
According to a 2010 report from Lambda Legal, more than half of respondents living with HIV experienced discrimination in health care. And 20 percent of respondents living with HIV reported such a high degree of anticipation around receiving discriminatory care that such concerns were a barrier to even seeking care.
Added Hanneman, “As we continue our work with the HEI, we want it to have the greatest impact for LGBT people — and that includes offering training to staff and administrators to reduce HIV stigma and provide high-quality, patient-centered care.”