Do Sexual Minority Women Face Barriers to Healthcare?

Barriers to healthcare for sexual minority women

Check out this answer from Consensus:

Sexual minority women face numerous barriers to healthcare, including heteronormative assumptions, prejudice, lack of cultural competence among providers, and systemic discrimination. These barriers lead to distrust, delayed care, and poorer health outcomes. Addressing these issues requires targeted education for healthcare providers, policy changes, and the creation of inclusive healthcare environments.

Sexual minority women (SMW) face significant barriers to accessing healthcare, which can negatively impact their health outcomes. The following synthesis highlights the key insights from multiple research papers on this topic.

Key Insights

  • Heteronormative Assumptions and Prejudice:
    • SMW often encounter heteronormative assumptions and prejudice from healthcare professionals, leading to negative healthcare experiences and reluctance to seek care .
  • Distrust and Fear of Mistreatment:
    • SMW generally distrust healthcare providers and fear mistreatment, which contributes to lower engagement with preventive health services, such as cancer screenings .
  • Lack of Cultural Competence:
    • Healthcare providers frequently lack the knowledge and skills to offer culturally competent care to SMW, exacerbating feelings of exclusion and discrimination .
  • Delayed Care Due to Discrimination:
    • Experiences of discrimination from healthcare providers lead to delayed care among SMW, which is associated with worse physical and emotional health outcomes.
  • Intersectionality of Identities:
    • The intersection of sexual orientation with other social identities, such as race and ethnicity, further complicates access to care, with nonwhite SMW facing additional barriers .
  • Systemic and Structural Barriers:
    • Systemic discrimination and structural barriers, such as lack of LGBTQ-inclusive documentation and environments, hinder SMW from accessing appropriate healthcare .
  • Need for Education and Policy Change:
    • There is a critical need for explicit and consistent education for healthcare professionals on SMW issues and stronger application of non-discrimination policies in clinical settings .

Do sexual minority women face barriers to healthcare?

Catherine Meads has answered Near Certain

An expert from Anglia Ruskin University in Health

Stigma and discrimination are common experiences that people who identify as LGBT or sexual minority face when accessing health services. One report found that one in seven LGBT people in the UK avoided seeking healthcare for fear of discrimination from staff. As many as one in four also experienced negative remarks against LGBT people from healthcare staff.

My colleagues and I recently conducted a systematic review which looked at the experiences of sexual minority women who had accessed UK health services. We defined “sexual minority” women as those who identified as lesbian or bisexual, women who have sex with other women, or live with or are married to another woman. This includes transgender women who identify as sexual minority as well as cisgender women.

We overwhelmingly found that women who identify as sexual minority experienced worse treatment in the healthcare system. We also found evidence that sexual minority women had worse health and well-being than heterosexual women, and tend to have worse health behaviours such as higher rates of smoking and drinking alcohol.