Affirming & Informed: An Interactive, Multidisciplinary Curriculum on Paediatric Gender-Affirming Care

Gender-affirming care is a protective factor for transgender and gender diverse youth, but a lack of healthcare providers trained in this area remains a barrier to access. While clinical guidelines recommend multidisciplinary collaboration and practice, there are limited opportunities for integrated, multidisciplinary education on paediatric gender-affirming care.

Affirming & Informed is a multidisciplinary, multimethod training designed to better meet this need for medical and behavioural healthcare providers and trainees. This article describes the curriculum and presents the results of programme evaluation pilot-testing.

As part of routine programme development and evaluation, participants completed presurveys and postsurveys of knowledge, awareness, attitudes, and intended behaviours. A total of 78 participants completed presurveys, and 23 completed postsurveys (out of approximately 128 registered participants). Results revealed high baseline scores in attitudes and intention to provide gender-affirming care and improvements in knowledge and awareness of the needs of transgender youth. Participants rated the content as highly aligned with learning objectives and indicated interest in advanced curriculum opportunities in the future.

The Affirming & Informed curriculum improves knowledge and awareness among providers and trainees across medical and behavioural health fields. Multidisciplinary training in paediatric gender-affirming care can add value to all healthcare providers given the specific overlapping and collaborative nature of caring for this underserved patient population.