Taking pride in our health conference transcripts of summary of talks

To mark the launch of the new Centre for LGBT research at DMU, we held the Taking Pride conference on Wednesday 24 February 2016. This conference uniquely brought together academic researchers in health alongside voluntary sector and provider organisations in health sexual health and well-being. This was the second annual conference, held during #DMUPride and UK national LGBT history month, to showcase current research and collaborations at De Montfort University.

Here, below is a summary of the talks and a summary of one of the workshop findings.

Julie Fish summarising the day’s work I’m Julie Fish, Professor in Social Work and Health Inequalities here at De Montfort University. I’m the Director of the newly formed LGBTQ Research Centre and this is our second conference for DMU Pride Month in February 2016 and we had a range of presentations here today and the aim of the conference was to begin to bridge the gap between research and those that deliver services in LGBTQ healthcare. So that was the intention of the conference today. In terms of recommendations, I think some of the individual workshops will have produced some kind of suggestions about taking things forward and what might be the next direction. I think as a conference, I’m not sure yet without thinking about it what recommendations have come out of it, but I think one of the things that has come clear to me, that it’s been a really good networking opportunity, so although something might not have been decided today, what people will go away with is forging those connections with other people and perhaps building some collaborative links that may or may not involve De Montfort University, but it’s also making sure that you know, if you’re as concerned as I am about LGBTQ health in the UK, I’m also interested in making sure that there is like an infrastructure of research to support service delivery. My particular interest at the moment is in LGBT cancer care and that’s kind of my current priority, but there may be other possibilities in the future that might be worth, that we might be able to develop some research in.

Paul Flowers – summarising his talk I’m Paul Flowers, Professor of Public Health Psychology at Glasgow Caledonian University. I’m here today to take part in the Taking Pride In Our Health one-day conference which is part of a monthwide event here at the De Montfort University.

What I really wanted to communicate to the audience today was a sense of the complexity of the challenge of reducing health inequalities amongst MSM as an example of LGBT communities, to try and get us to think around the role of syndetic theory, that health inequalities can be additive or add on to each other, to get us to think around the role of intersectionality, to focus on subpopulations such as black and minority MSM or people with disabilities. So it was to really think about those issues and to try and think where could we intervene most effectively within those frameworks.

Chaka Bachman – summarising her talk My name is Chaka Bachman, I’m a research officer at Stonewall and I’m here today at the Taking Pride In Our Health Conference at the De Montfort University to share the research findings of the Unhealthy Attitude Report. We have discovered that even though a lot of service providers want to deliver the best service to LGBT patients, there’s still a lot of bullying and discrimination present, so

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in order to change that, I would suggest to empower more role models, produce more inclusive information and also, do more training.

Iain Williamson – summarising his talk Okay hello, my name is Iain Williamson and I’m a psychology lecturer and researcher here at De Montfort University in Leicester. I’m taking part in the conference today and I’ve been giving a presentation on some research around lesbian, gay and bisexual people’s experience of cancer care, looking at some of the kind of particular concerns that people have about managing disclosure, about interpreting negative practice and about looking at the way in which a lot of psycho-social support tends to be fairly heteronormative and tends to be very much kind of one size fits all. I’m also facilitating a workshop looking at developing research in this field further and I’m engaging with a variety of stakeholders to see what form that research should take.

Makinder Chahal My name’s Makinder and I’m from a local LGB and T health charity called Trade Sexual Health.

Today at the Taking Pride Conference at De Montfort as part of DMU Pride. Myself and my colleague delivered a presentation even, sort of, we delivered a presented on stats for life and actually how we really want people to, not just individuals, but also voluntary sector organisations, to pick up stats and research which is already sitting there and to actually action it into services which could benefit and change LGB and T people’s lives in the long run, so not just at the beginning and not just near the end of the life, but throughout their whole life course, and I think what we really want to encourage is a two-way communication actually. The two-way communication between researchers and VCS organisations and likewise, VCS organisations talking to researchers to see what they can do to help one another.

Iain Williamson - summary of his and Martin Wells’ workshop Okay, so I’m Iain Williamson, I’ve just facilitated a workshop with Martin Wells as part of the Taking Pride In Our Health Conference here at De Montfort University in Leicester and we’ve been talking with a variety of people about moving forward on future research and particularly, trying to look at what that research should look like in terms of the methods it should use, in terms of the resources it should actually kind of produce at the end, to try and make sure that we’re kind of producing something that’s academically rigorous and at the same time, is meeting the needs of healthcare professionals and LGBT people with cancer.

So we’ve been given lots of information to come to work with and take away but my initial conclusions would be that people think we should have diversity in the methods to ensure accessibility of people from a variety of approaches, and I think also that people are looking at the interactions, the moments where things can be quite different, where very quick choices are actually made that actually have much more profound impact than perhaps a healthcare professional realises at that time and then developing training resources to perhaps work around that to try and ensure sort of best practice more frequently.

24 February 2016