In 2005-06, several AAMC surveys looked into the prevalence of gay discrimination among US medical schools (article here). In the past month the AAMC has solicited current practices or recommendations from schools so that they can include schools' examples in an upcoming "effective practices" memorandum. As you know, I had nothing to send them because we have nothing in place. Right now at UVA, there is no group (including Mulholland) that concerns itself with gay life issues in medical education. Furthermore, the only instance (I recall) that facilitated a discussion on sexuality and medical practice was Dr. Hong's talk as part of Psychiatry in second year. Frankly, this is not enough.
In the last Mulholland meeting, a consensus was reached on the need for more consideration of these issues and facilitation of discussion on relevant gay health issues. The AAMC is also currently considering an effort to reach general concensus within the medical education community regarding essential knowledge, skills, and attitudes that graduating MDs (that's us) should possess in the area of human sexuality and gender identity.

As a consequence, Mulholland has resolved to introduce GLBT healthcare programming. If you are interested in helping get this started, please reply.

Peter,

From reading the AAMC article for which you provided the link, it sounds like there are two programming issues to be addressed: 1) discrimination/lack of supportive environment for GLBT medical students and 2) training future physicians to not be bigoted against their GLBT patients.

I'd love to help with either or both issues.

Peter,

I'd be happy to help out with this initiative. I've done some work with LGBT groups undergrad and I'm currently working with AIDS Services Group in Cville on some LGBT-specific health issues. I'd love to assist in whatever capacity I can.

Great! I think the issue of discrimination stands apart from the changes that can be made on an educational level, but both are important concerns.

What should be the primary goal at UVA, for 2008?

How do you suppose it can best be accomplished here? Last week, the thought was that Mulholland would start by sponsoring talks and other programming, with the hope that interested students would emerge to take the reins.

Does that sound like the kind of approach you would want to support? Do you have other ideas? What needs, specifically, should be addressed first, and how?

When I was an undergrad, we started our programming planning by doing a survey to assess the campus climate and the specific concerns of LGBT students. Perhaps we could try to do an informal online questionnaire to figure out where we are as a school and what issues need to be addressed first. Plus, we could call ourselves "evidence-based" and get in on the hot new thing . . .

Patrick, you can create a new topic in this forum and add a poll as one of the options. Any registered user can participate in the poll - and suddenly a quantitative sample of student opinion exists! Unfortunately I think it only works for one question. If other questions are needed, we may have to move on to more capable software.

If you can think of a few questions to post as new topics, go for it! Then all we have to do is tell people, by email or in person, to visit the site and vote. They will also be able to post replies to the thread.