Nurse here! This keeps popping into my mind, keeps leaving me drawing a blank. Healthcare is a massive and resource-devouring industry, but is stuffed with people who actually give a shit about the people around them: the industry is a good candidate for improvement, and the people in it are likely to actually embrace those improvements (well, barring the odd salty af mofo who loses their shit at the first signs of change, but that person’s in every industry - they’ll figure it out eventually.)
I work in a run-of-the-mill hospital in the US, which encourages staff to take on system improvement projects, and these are were I see potential - especially for new nurses gunning for promotions.
The problem is what and how. All I can think of are things like recycling programs to tackle medical waste, but (at my facility at least) the waste that isn’t already being recycled is either biohazardous or risks becoming biohazardous (like medication waste is huge, but we can’t save half a vial of unused injection due to the possibility of that being contaminated by the first needle that drew from it).
So, looking for project ideas, both that I can start to implement myself, or to suggest to other staff looking to polish their resume. Smaller scale stuff is great for newer nurses; big scale stuff I can throw at management and see what sticks.
Let me know if you think of anything! Thanks all!
I’m sorry, but this is just naive. Many hospitals and doctors refuse to offer HRT based solely on self-identification even though WPATH acknowledges that it is just as safe as a psychological gatekeeping track.
And when HRT is provided, trans men are trusted to do testosterone injections bybthe same hospitals that require trans women to visit a GP for estrogen injections even though both are equally risk-prone. Anti-androgens can be more complicated, but that too can be taught in an hour.
Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of trans people across the world take pharmaceuticals from illegal and semi-legal suppliers with no bad batches that I’ve heard of. Like with addictive drugs, illegal suppliers tend to know their stuff.
Perhaps you’ve rationalized your fear at trans DIY as concern about people fucking up, but when and where that fear is applied is simply inconsistent, and systematically disempowers and provides worse service to trans people, women, people of color, and other minorities.
What people in medicine are afraid of is empowering minorities. Concern for our wellbeing if we were to be empowered is just the language to justify that feeling.
I’m not saying you’re deliberately setting out to be discriminatory, just that the medical culture has taught you to have a different gut reaction to a cis man regulating his own medication than to a trans nonbinary person doing the same.
Previous poster specified “medics” which I understood as the people on the actual units providing care; and their reluctance to teach skills without the foundation of knowledge that enables those skills. My take was to put myself in their shoes and consider why - the very obvious answer being that doing so can cause harm. The number of bigots working the front lines is of course higher than zero, but also a very clear minority, so jumping to that as the answer to why they behave a certain way around trans people is not correct.
You’re getting more into all the bullshit that influences healthcare at the systemic level: administration, politics, religion… and your right, the answers there get a lot more nefarious, but are very much not the people the previous poster or I was discussing.