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Queens Fish Bar
12:18 Tue Jun 5
Re: Job interview asking sexual orientation?
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/04/nearly-two-million-britons-expected-question-gender-health-boss/
The NHS must "be prepared" for nearly two million Britons to question their gender in coming years, a health boss has said.
James Palmer, the medical director for specialised services at NHS England, said in the future he expected up to three per cent of the population would make contact with transgender health services at some point in their lives.
Speaking at a conference on Monday Mr Palmer said that the expansion and improvement of NHS services could cause the growth in demand to "accelerate".
"We've got to be prepared to start thinking about designing a healthcare service that will allow somewhere around one to three per cent of the population at some point in their lives having a discussion about their gender," he said.
Based on current population estimates, this would mean 1.97m people in the UK using gender identity services, with around 1.6m of these living in England.
He told the audience that "referrals to adult services have increased by 240 per cent over the last five year period.
"There are currently 7,500 adults waiting for an appointment with our services. No other specialist service has seen this growth, anywhere near. As a result there is absolutely not sufficient capacity in the system," he warned.
Britain's first openly transgender officer tells her story
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However Mr Palmer, a former consultant neurosurgeon, also said he believed the growth was "a good thing".
"It's got to be a good thing is that there are people out there that want to explore their gender. The fact that it's in the younger age group has got to be a good thing.
"For a young adult, to be able to come forward, to seek that expertise, earlier [rather] than much much later in life, that's got to be a good thing," he said.
Experts also told the audience at the Westminster Social Policy Forum event, titled "Next steps for transgender equality - inclusion, rights and services", that the age profile of people approaching services was getting younger.
In one case study, the average age of patients referred to the Nottingham gender clinic, which treats people aged 17 and over, had dropped from 40 when it first opened in 1998 to just over 20 currently.
Dr Polly Carmichael, clinical director of the gender identity development service at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which treats children and young people, said the organisation had experienced an "unprecedented" 100 per cent increase in referrals between 2015 and 2016.
Children are not given cross-sex hormones at the clinic until the age of 16 but may be given puberty blockers which delay the onset of puberty.
Dr Carmichael added that data showed children referred before puberty were less likely to go on to have physical treatment later in life.
Earlier in the day the BBC's head of diversity and inclusion Tunde Ogungbesan said it was to provide support for lesbian and transgender people after it realised that most of its senior LGBT staff were gay or bisexual.
It had initially excluded LGBT people from a series of schemes designed to help underrepresented groups at the BBC after surveys showed that 11 per cent of the BBC's workforce were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, 12 per cent of whom were in positions of leadership.
But bosses changed their minds after staff pointed out that most of the most senior figures were gay and bisexual, and there was a lack of lesbian and transgender figures.
"We were missing the fact that even though we do have these high figures, these were mainly the Gs and the Bs," he said.
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