Abstract Book of the 4th International Conference on LGBT Studies
Year: 2025
[PDF]
Exploring Interventions to Improve Healthcare Access for LGBTQ+ Individuals
Dr. Kianté McKinley
ABSTRACT:
Despite growing awareness of LGBTQ+ rights, persistent disparities in healthcare access remain a stark reality, primarily for LGBTQ+ individuals who are Black, Brown, transgender, and nonbinary. These populations face intersecting forms of oppression, including institutional discrimination, implicit provider bias, and systemic gaps in culturally competent and affirming care. As a result, many are left navigating fragmented, stigmatizing, or unsafe healthcare systems that do not reflect or support their lived experiences.
This session explores the intersection of research, community engagement, and social innovation as powerful tools to disrupt these inequities and reimagine healthcare access through a justice-centered lens. Grounded in findings from the qualitative research initiative Exploring Interventions to Improve Healthcare Access for LGBTQ+ Individuals, the session highlights trauma-informed strategies currently being implemented by frontline organizations such as the Los Angeles LGBT Center. This community-based agency exemplifies how culturally responsive, peer-led outreach models, and harm reduction frameworks can be leveraged to reshape service delivery systems and improve health outcomes.
A key feature of this session is an in-depth exploration of a Health and Resources Fair, a community-driven event designed to bring together public health, mental wellness, housing, and advocacy resources in an inclusive and celebratory space. This fair serves as both an intervention and a replicable model for grassroots innovation. It exemplifies how intersectional inclusion, cross-sector collaboration, and trauma-informed engagement can create access points that are responsive, sustainable, and rooted in trust.
Participants will engage with actionable insights drawn from field-based evidence and lived experience that supports inclusive practice transformation. By the end of the session, attendees will:
• Understand the systemic and structural challenges that impact LGBTQ+ healthcare access, particularly for those at the intersection of race, gender identity, and socio-economic marginalization.
• Acquire practical strategies for developing and implementing inclusive, trauma-informed health initiatives that affirm identity and promote wellness.
• Explore a replicable framework for organizing health and resource fairs that center community leadership, build trust, and enhance service accessibility.
• Learn evaluation and sustainability strategies grounded in DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) principles and culturally competent approaches.
This session is ideal for healthcare providers, public health professionals, social workers, program administrators, researchers, and DEI consultants committed to advancing health equity for LGBTQ+ communities. By foregrounding community resilience, lived expertise, and social innovation, the session invites participants to co-create a vision of healthcare access that is not a privilege for some but a right for all, achieved through intentional action, inclusivity, and collaborative design.
Keywords: LGBTQ+ health equity, culturally competent care, trauma-informed care, trauma-informed approaches, Community-based research, social innovation, harm reduction, Intersectionality, health disparities, Black and Brown LGBTQ+ communities, transgender healthcare access, public health engagement, community resilience, DEI-informed practice, healthcare access, Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI)