'The DO' interviews Keith Egan (COM ’14) on LGBT awareness among health care providers
On May 1, 2014, The DO published an article titled “Caring for LGBT patients: A primer,” for which Keith Egan, a 2014 graduate of the College of Osteopathic Medicine (COM), was interviewed.
The article, which addresses the need for health care providers to be aware of health issues affecting the LGBT population, discusses the growth of COM’s focus on this issue over the years. In 2010, when Egan began his medical training, COM did not offer any LGBT training. He and fellow students, however, persuaded the administration to introduce a required four-hour course for first-year medical students. Since then, the course has expanded, and fist-year COM students now take a mandatory day-long seminar on LGBT health issues.
“It’s really important for medical students to start thinking about the diversity within the patient population that they’re going to work with and how the diversity of experiences of those patients is going to affect their health,” Egan noted. “It’s important to talk about the health disparities within the different communities and to have discussions on why those disparities exist.”
