Abstract

Discrimination and harassment of LGBTQ+ healthcare professionals and patients has become increasingly well documented in the current literature. These issues can potentially lead to recruitment and retention issues related to LGBTQ+ healthcare professionals, and poorer outcomes for LGBTQ+ patients. In order to address these issues, it is important to have a better description of the environment in which LGBTQ+ individuals are administering and receiving healthcare. One method of gaining this better description is to be able to accurately capture the knowledge of and attitudes toward LGBTQ+ individuals and issues facing the LGBTQ+ community among healthcare providers. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to create an instrument designed to measure the knowledge and attitudes of healthcare professionals related to LGBTQ+ persons and the issues they face. Upon recruiting a panel of 15 healthcare professionals the Delphi technique was used in a similar manner to that which was performed in previous studies in which survey instruments and consensus statements were created. Following rating and ranking of the statements and questions presented to the panel, a total of 14 statements to measure attitudes toward LGBTQ+ individuals and eight questions to measure knowledge of LGBTQ+ individuals were included in the final instrument. While the instrument still requires further study to establish reliability and validity, the survey is presented for consideration and use in future research projects.