Who We Are
The Gender Health Research Program (GHRP), a collaboration between the Mary Bridge Children’s Gender Health Clinic and the MultiCare Institute for Research & Innovation, aims to generate high-quality, patient-centered research to improve gender-affirming care access, quality, and experience, and to support trans and gender diverse (TGD) youth and their families.
Research Efforts
Gender Empower Interviews – Understanding Empowerment
We are currently researching how trans and nonbinary youth are empowered in healthcare spaces. To do this, we are holding 30-45-minute interviews with trans and nonbinary youth. During these interviews we will ask participants about their identity, experiences with peer support, and healthcare experiences. This work will help us improve a questionnaire that is used to measure patient empowerment for trans and nonbinary youth. To participate, youth must be 14-21 years old and have received gender-affirming puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery. Anyone under age 18 will need parent permission to participate.
This study is supported by the Marco J. Heidner Charitable Trust and the MultiCare Institute for Research & Innovation.
Youth, Caregivers, and Health Care Professionals: Integrating stakeholder driven research for transgender youth
The GHRP is studying health care discrepancies that exist for TGD youth through research that will bring together groups of gender-diverse youth, caregivers of TGD youth, and health care professionals. Using focus groups and surveys, we will first explore gaps and areas of need in gender-affirming care access, experience, and provision. Then we will delineate patient-centered outcomes research directions for this population that will inform new applications for research funding. This project will also establish a Gender Health Stakeholder Advisory Council which will instill stakeholder voice and perspective into the work of the gender clinic and gender health research efforts moving forward. To learn more about this study, visit our funding page.
This project was supported by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute and the Marco J. Heidner Charitable Trust.
Gender Empower
This confidential survey will explore the health care empowerment that TGD youth (ages 14-24) experience in navigating gender-affirming care. We will use the data from these surveys to evaluate overall health care empowerment, domain-specific empowerment, and the associations between health care empowerment and key demographic variables, such as gender-identity, sex assigned at birth, age, and time since initiation of gender-affirming care. Results from this study are expected to help health care professionals better understand the care experiences of TGD youth, and we hope to build additional research projects on this work.
This study was supported in part by the Mary Bridge Children’s Foundation. Publications related to this study are listed in the publication section below.