Improving the health care experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender patients

• Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people can encounter health care discrimination.
• Patient-facing professionals like radiographers routinely work with LGBT patients.
• Positive changes can be made to improve patient care and access.
• These include changes to the environment, health form improvement and training.

Systematic discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people (LGBT) persists across most contemporary societies and institutions such as health care despite increasing social tolerance and legislative progress. This article explores discrimination against LGBT people, and examines LGBT health and social issues. The implications this has for health care access and quality of care delivered by patient-facing health care professionals such as radiographers are explored. Finally, three categories of suggestions to improve the care of LGBT patients are suggested; changes to the physical environment, improvement in health forms and awareness training. Some of these suggestions can be taken up directly by radiographers, particular accessing training. Others (such as positive changes in the physical space) could be championed by department managers. There is a need to promote better culturally competent training for radiographers to be able to sensitively respond to their LGBT patients' specific health and social needs.