Background: Despite increasing public awareness of the discrimination faced by transgender people, transgender health care continues fall short, with literature pointing to stigma as well as overt transphobia as reasons why transgender individuals skip necessary visits to the physician. Many practicing physicians feel uncomfortable taking care of transgender patients, even when conducting health care visits that focus on benign topics, like management of essential hypertension in a 50 year-old trans female. Where do we intervene? How do we utilize medical education to improve transgender health care with the next generation of physicians? Through storytelling- by transgender people themselves. Methods: This project is in the early stages of development and recently achieved IRB approval through the University of North Texas at Denton. Subjects are currently being recruited. The project proposes to create a free, open-access, web-based curriculum designed to educate medical students and residents on how to give compassionate care to disadvantaged populations who are in great need of consistent, stigma-free, and socially informed health care. Curricula surrounding transgender patient care will be the first module of many in this series, which will include obese patients, chronic pain patients, HIV+ individuals, patients with addiction disorders, and many more. Goals: While the goal of this project is to create a flexible online teaching environment that easily molds into existing medical school curricula across the country, these researchers also wish to collect significant analytics from the curriculum. The site will be supported by an online dashboard allowing for access of modules, tracking completed modules and awarding certificates of completion, and importantly will be a reservoir of analytics provided from pre and post test surveys. Conclusion: We hypothesize that via utilizing patient oral histories presented in a documentary film format, medical students can improve their perceived empathy towards underserved populations, beginning with our first collection of stories by transgender patients. We believe this is a low-cost, easily implemented, and effective way to combat the decline in empathy medical students experience during their training and subsequent transition to the workforce. Reaching out to medical students before they become physicians is a well-timed intervention to improve compassionate care towards vulnerable populations.
