Dr Mike Campbell, Senior Lecturer in Behavioural Science/Psychology, Chair, HIV and AIDS Response Programme, University of the West Indies–Cave Hill and member of the PANCAP Knowledge Management Working Group (PKMWG), in collaboration with a team of researchers, published a study examing the attitudes of medical students toward transgender people and the critical implications for the future quality of healthcare for Caribbean transgender patients.

The research also considered implications for developing transgender curricula in Caribbean medical education.

The methodology involved medical students enrolled at a publicly supported Caribbean university completing the Transgender Attitudes and Beliefs Scale (TABS; Kanamori et al., 2017).

The study is particularly pivotal for regional stakeholders in the STI and HIV response as few studies of attitudes toward transgender people among health professionals or students exist in the Caribbean.

The research recommended that effective transgender curriculum content needed to be built from the ethics of respect for persons to include more targeted coverage of evidence-based knowledge, both clinical and sociocultural, of transgender issues. Further, the authors suggested an effective curriculum should consist of an experiential component to help medical students work with greater levels of comfort when treating transgender patients. Medical educators (e.g., Noonan et al.,2018) have emphasized the growing necessity of transgender-specific curricula, and the findings suggest that increasing personal comfort among medical students should be a part of such curricula in the Caribbean.

The study is available on PANCAP.org; click here to access.