Purpose: Provider curricula to reduce potential weight bias or stigma in treating lesbian and bisexual (LB) women who are overweight or obese were pilot-tested in two unique settings. Trainings used LB cultural competency and motivational interviewing techniques to improve provider-patient interactions.
Methods: Two training formats were used: Clinic Format and Academic Format. Clinic Format training was pilot tested at Lyon-Martin Health Services, a Program of HealthRight360, a community health center serving women, lesbians, and transgender people in San Francisco and in two community settings. Academic Format training was pilot tested by the Mautner Project of Whitman-Walker Health with physicians, medical residents, and students at Georgetown, George Washington, Howard, and Vanderbilt Universities. Both programs measured provider knowledge and attitude change.
Results: Both programs saw significant percentage point gains in knowledge about LB women's avoidance of health care based on body size. Participants in the Academic Format program saw the greatest gain in knowledge about understanding health care avoidance (30 percentage point increase), whereas Clinic Format program participants gained most in understanding how to appropriately discuss weight loss with patients (23 percentage point increase).
Conclusions: Both programs increased provider knowledge about the barriers to health care facing LB women who are overweight and obese, reducing the potential for future negative interactions. However, the two programs differed in how they conceptualized the relationship between weight and health, likely contributing to differences in knowledge gain among participants at each site. Future studies should test differences between the two formats across site type or staff baseline knowledge differences.
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