Increasing Inclusivity and Reducing Reactance During Provider-Patient Interactions.

Area of Science:

• Health Disparities
• Medical Sociology
• Patient-Provider Communication

Background:

• Transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals face significant health disparities.
• Discrimination in healthcare settings reduces their likelihood of seeking care.
• Inclusivity efforts must be simple and avoid backlash from certain patient groups.

Purpose of the Study:

• To experimentally test patient reactions to two methods of provider inclusivity signaling.
• To assess the impact of verbal pronoun sharing versus pronoun pins on patient satisfaction and willingness to return.
• To identify effective and implementable strategies for increasing healthcare inclusivity.

Main Methods:

• Three online studies used hypothetical scenarios to test patient responses.
• Method 1: Provider verbally shares and requests patient pronouns.
• Method 2: Provider wears a pronoun pin without verbal interaction.

Main Results:

• Verbal pronoun requests led to lower satisfaction and return rates among politically conservative participants.
• Provider pronoun pins did not cause backlash among conservative participants.
• Pronoun pins increased satisfaction and return rates for transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer participants.

Conclusions:

• Healthcare inclusivity recommendations should consider potential negative impacts on politically conservative patients.
• Subtle methods like pronoun pins are more implementable for providers.
• Pronoun pins effectively signal inclusivity to the target community without alienating other groups.