What is the DPH/Fenway Health Training Initiative?
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH)/Fenway Health Training Initiative is a partnership designed to further improve the visibility, availability, and applicability of educational resources and trainings for health care professionals to improve care for the LGBTQIA+ community.
This initiative will offer educational opportunities and trainings for health and social services staff at all levels of the health care workforce about culturally adept care for LGBTQIA+ patients and service users.
DPH is dedicated to providing high-quality care for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and all sexually and gender diverse (LGBTQIA+) people.
Why is DPH undertaking this initiative?
DPH’s goal is to ensure that all LGBTQIA+ individuals in the Commonwealth can access necessary, knowledgeable, and respectful health services from licensed providers and their support staff.
This initiative will further improve the visibility, availability, and applicability of educational resources for the health care workforce to ensure that goal, and address the stigma, bias, and discrimination when accessing healthcare that this population experiences regularly. In doing so, DPH seeks to significantly expand the initiative introduced through legislation in 2018, which was primarily focused on care for older adults.
This initiative will create and promote core training materials that will reach 550,000+ healthcare professionals across DPH’s professional licensing boards. This will embed good practice on a broad scale throughout health care professions, and communities in Massachusetts.
What is The Fenway Institute?
The Fenway Institute is an interdisciplinary center for research, education, training and policy development with a pioneering history of community and academic collaborations. The Fenway Institute brings over 25 years’ experience training healthcare staff on providing skilled and affirming health care. The Fenway Institute offers expertise in project planning and management, training development and implementation. The Fenway Institute was founded in 2001 with Doctors Kenneth Mayer and Judith Bradford as Co-Chairs and quickly grew into one of the preeminent LGBTQIA+ health and HIV research, education and policy organizations in the world.
The Fenway Institute has provided continuous leadership in the creation of a national agenda on LGBTQIA+ health, including work with the US Surgeon General’s Office to ensure the inclusion of sexual minorities in Healthy People 2010 and prominent contributions to the Healthy People 2010 Companion Document on LGBT Health.
The Fenway Institute envisions a world in which health equity is achieved for sexual and gender minorities (SGM) and the HIV epidemic is history.
What education training is available?
The Division of Education and Training at The Fenway Institute has created and developed training content for a variety of different intended audiences including but not limited to:
Physicians • Nurses • Medical Assistants • Community Outreach Workers • Peer Navigators • Front line staff • Administrators • Executive Leadership Training content topics include but are not limited to:
- Creating an Inclusive and Welcoming Environment
- Effective and Affirming Communication
- Collecting Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Data
- Implicit Bias and Power Imbalances
- Primary Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse Patients
- Affirming Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents
- Trauma Informed Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse Patients
- Care for LGBTQIA+ Older Adults - Affirming Reproductive Health Care for LGBTQIA+
- Cultural Adaptation of Measures and Tools for SOGI Data Collection
- Telehealth for LGBTQIA+ Patients
- Communities Integrated Behavioral Health Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse People
The Fenway Institute reviews all training and educational content on a yearly basis, updating content to include new information when applicable.
For a full list of courses and descriptions, visit DPH/Fenway Health Training Courses.
How are the training resources accessed?
How to Create an Account on the National LGBTQIA+ Education Center Website and find these resources
- Visit The Fenway Institute webpage and find the “My Learning” dropdown menu and select “login”
- Select “Register an Account” on the page
- From the homepage, you can search for learning resources in a few ways:
- Search by title or keyword using the search icon in the top right corner of the page
- Under “Learning Resources” on the toolbar, select “All Resources” or the type of resource you’d like to search through.
4. From the “Learning Resources” page, you can search through all our resources, either by scrolling, narrowing down by resource type using the menu on the right, or the right corner of the page.
Can CE credits be earned?
Continuing Education Credit
Most courses on Fenway’s website are 1.0 contact hours of continuing education and are accredited by the American Academy of Family Physicians. You may be eligible to receive continuing education credit for these courses. In order to be eligible for continuing education credit, you must be registered as a user on our website and complete the evaluation of the course while logged into your user account. This may be done after watching the presentation as a group or individually.
Health Equality Index Credit
HEI is the Health Equality Index, an LGBTQIA+ benchmarking tool that evaluates healthcare facilities' policies and practices related to the equity and inclusion of their LGBTQIA+ patients, visitors and employees. You can learn more at the Human Rights Campaign HEI website. To opt-in to HEI reporting, visit the HEI section of your profile page, provide your HEI facility code, and your completions will automatically be reported for HEI credit.