Officials from Howard Brown Health Center met May 19 as part of their Town Hall series focusing on the health of specific populations within the LGBT community.
Turnout for the public meeting, which focused on health concerns for lesbian, bisexual and trans women, was very low, with only a few community members attending. HBHC President David Munar said that pointed to a challenge HBHC faced, getting messages out to women within the community.
Chief Medical Officer Magda Houlberg said that female populations must often contend with "a systemic issue of engagement with healthcare."
Houlberg said that many women's health apparatuses were structured around reproductive health, which many LBT women might not necessarily need to access. One participant noted that even HBHC's website page about women's health services was inordinately preoccupied with artificial insemination.
Houlberg said that many women do not begin to regularly engage with a physician regularly until they are well into their 30s and 40s.
Oftentimes, Illinois Breast and Cervical Cancer Program Patient Navigator Susie Narak added, mixed messages about women's health—varying recommendations about when and how often to go in for mammograms and pap smears, for example—can leave women confused about when they should be accessing medical care.
"There are a lot of mixed messages out there," Narak said. "A lot of people don't come in until something's actually wrong. There's some embarrassment sometimes."
Michelle Wetzel, senior vice president of Policy, Strategy and Business Development, noted that some women in larger households might also be inclined to put their focus on the health of other family members in front of their own: "Sometimes you end up putting yourself last."
Munar asked what work HBHC needed to do to get out their messaging about women's health and the center's programming.
Wetzel said that historically that task had been daunting—there is no "strip" for LBT women like Halsted Street where you can find many gay men, she said, adding "It's a lot easier to do outreach for gay men."
Participants suggested a number of community events, among them gatherings such as brunches, or "thrift store crawls" between the Brown Elephant stores, that could address health issues and introduce community members to HBHC and Lesbian Community Care Project programming.
HBHC has a number of town hall meetings addressing the needs of various parts of the LGBT community planned over the course of the next several weeks. For more information, visit www.howardbrown.org/hb_news.asp .
