Towards Best-Practice Healthcare for Transgender Patients: Quality Improvement in United Kingdom General Practice

Introduction: The ongoing care of transgender patients in United Kingdom (UK) general practice (GP) is hampered by a lack of UK primary care guidelines regarding the monitoring of treatments, despite the key role that general practice has in holistic lifelong care. This quality improvement project aimed to audit the monitoring of treatments and health screening in a GP practice population, across two large practices in southwest England, in order to drive local improvement and to identify gaps in wider healthcare support for this population. Methods: This project updated a previously published audit instrument, incorporating a novel, pragmatic standard, based on up-to-date UK gender clinic guidelines and the UK population screening programmes. National Health Service (NHS) Health Research Authority and Medical Research Council processes were used to confirm that this quality improvement project did not require formal ethics committee approval. An audit against this standard was performed for 176 transgender and gender-minority patients, to provide data on the consistency of the monitoring of gender hormonal treatments and reminders for appropriate population health screening programmes. Results: A total of 16% of those undergoing hormonal treatments had received optimal monitoring; 20% were missing the most basic hormone level monitoring. Reminders regarding appropriate health screening were rare in patients who had changed the gender markers on their electronic record. Long waiting lists, the use of private clinics, confusion around responsibilities shared between primary and secondary care and growing complex co-morbidity were demonstrated. Conclusions: This project supports previous calls for consistent evidence-based guidelines, improved data systems and adequately resourced primary and secondary care services to support the safe and effective lifelong care of transgender patients.