jwg

Yesterday I as co-chair of the Cambridge GLBT Commission and Elysia Chandler, the Commission Researcher-Intern gave a presentation at the LGBT Elders in a Changing World conference at Salem State University. I gave an overview of the Commission's work and Elysia gave the meat of the presentation about our Health Care survey. The title was "How to Locally Assess and Promote LGBT Inclusive Healthcare & Housing Options for Elders."

We had recently completed a survey of Polices and Practices wrt to LGBT Elders in Health Care Organizations (hospitals, medical facilites, and nursing homes) in the city of Cambridge. The process involved working with management f the organizations, conducting a survey of employees, then drawing our conclusions and going back to the organizations. The overall scheme was not to create a ScoreCard but to establish a relationshop with these organizations to help them improve. A salient element of what we found was that although many organizations had policies that many emplyees didn't know what they were and thus they weren't put into practice.

In the future we will do another survey as check on progress. Meanwhile we are doing a similar survey in Housing projects in Cambridge. First we are surveying staff and at a later date we will survey residents. And we just got budget approval to do a similar survey of Youth After-School activities of which there are a large number of them of many types: tutoring ... sports...

The report from the Health Care study is available on the City of Cambridge web site at http://tinyurl.com/qcbkq46

Soon the presentation will be there also. Now it is at http://www.gintell.org/LGBTEldersConf-2016.pptx.pdf