Health Professionals, Medical Bodies & Community Orgs Call For Publication Of Guidelines For Gender Affirming Care
Health professionals are asking for updated guidance on providing appropriate and safe healthcare to transgender and non-binary patients.
In 2023 Health NZ | Te Whatu Ora contracted the Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa (PATHA) to update the 2018 guidelines for gender affirming healthcare. It is standard practice for guidelines to be periodically updated to ensure their content is kept up to date. PATHA submitted the updated guidelines in October 2024 and they followed the standard process for publication of a clinical guideline, and were approved by Te Whatu Ora's National Clinical Governance Group.
'It is frustrating for so much work to have been put into the update of these guidelines by so many experts in this field, only to have them held up at this final stage,' says Dr Rona Carroll, PATHA Vice-President. 'The need for this updated guidance is clear and something I hear from health professionals on a daily basis. We just want to be able to publish these guidelines so the clinicians who need them can use them.'
The evidence-based guidelines, which have been peer reviewed by clinicians with expertise in this care from within New Zealand and internationally, cover a wide range of topics relevant to transgender and non-binary health and wellbeing, including new chapters on creating inclusive healthcare environments, non-medical gender affirmation options, and more. The small section within this comprehensive document relating to prescribing puberty blockers aligns with the Ministry of Health's position statement on this care and supports safe prescribing for young people. The guidelines were due for publication at the end of March 2025.
'We're aware that in the days before publication, an FYI was sent to the Minister and Associate Minister of Health,' says Jennifer Shields, PATHA President. 'Less than 24 hours before the date of publication, there was an unnecessary, indefinite and unexplained delay in the publication of these clinical guidelines, we believe due to unprecedented and inappropriate political interference. Delays in releasing these guidelines impacts on the ability to improve healthcare delivery and health outcomes for the transgender and non-binary population.'
Signatories to the open letter, which include medical bodies, health services, rainbow community organisations, and individual practitioners are calling on the government to allow Health NZ | Te Whatu Ora to publish the updated Guidelines for Gender Affirming Healthcare in Aotearoa New Zealand immediately.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
RNZ News
44 minutes ago
- RNZ News
102,446 people on radiology wait list
102,446. That's the number of people around the country on the radiology wait list in the queue in the public health system for M-R-I's, X-rays, C-T scans and other diagnostic tests. That's according to a report by the union representing medical imaging technologists and sonographers. APEX says radiology services are unravelling, with 50 % of the patients waiting concentrated in just five districts according to data from March this year. It also says Te Whatu ora Health New Zealand has spent more than a hundred million dollars in the past year outsourcing radiology services to private providers. Meanwhile 45 percent of the health workers who answered the APEX survey say they are working with broken, outdated or unsafe equipment. Omar Hamed is an APEX Advocate based in Auckland. He joined Lisa Owen Tags: To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
RNZ News
an hour ago
- RNZ News
IV drug users demanding say in needle exchange services
Intravenous drug users are demanding a say in the future of the South Island's needle exchange services, warning health leaders are gambling with their lives. In seven weeks, needle exchange programme DISC Trust will hand over its long-standing contract, which provides sterile drug injecting equipment at six sites around the South Island. Health NZ's chosen new provider still hasn't revealed how or where it plans to run the service. Katie Todd reports. Tags: To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
RNZ News
6 hours ago
- RNZ News
National health plan fails to meet Auditor-General's expectations
The Auditor-General says the plan developed by Health New Zealand did not meet his expectations for a costed plan. Photo: Unsplash / RNZ The Auditor-General says the country's nationwide health plan for the next two years is not up to his expectations. He says it lacks important details, including the basic costs of services. Health NZ is in charge of putting out a plan through to 2027 that shows how public health services will be delivered, and the cost. But Auditor-General John Ryan, in a letter at the back of the 85-page plan , said it did not do this. "The plan developed by Health New Zealand does not meet my expectations for a costed plan," he said after auditing it. This meant he was unable to offer an opinion on whether the plan provided a reasonable basis for delivering public services to improve health. A bill before Parliament removes the need for future plans to go to the Auditor-General. "I expected the plan to provide a clear explanation of how the actions have been selected and prioritised, and how the actions will contribute to the achievement of the desired improvements and targets. The plan does not do this," Ryan wrote. "I expected the plan to be based on clear and reasonable assumptions about health needs and the expected quantity of service demand, the resources needed to provide those services, and the forecast cost of those resources. The plan does not do this." The plan should describe how investment and service changes would achieve the right outcomes, laying out what assumptions and trade-offs were expected, but it did not. Health NZ has an out. In the plan, it said it had been expected to take six years - or two three-year planning cycles - to fully develop systems to ensure full costings and budgets for its core services. The 2024-27 plan indicated its processes were not there yet. "It is not costed to the level of traceability and integration between the financials, activities, and desired improvements expected from a fully mature New Zealand Health Plan," it said. The plan was submitted to Ryan by the former commissioner Dr Lester Levy and deputy commissioners of health in May. Levy now chairs the new board of HNZ. The plan is titled, "Timely access to quality health care." Levy said in the foreword it "outlines actions to deliver better health outcomes for all New Zealanders". He does not mention it is not mature or properly costed; this is mentioned on page 44. Levy oversaw a reset at the beleaguered agency after a financial meltdown in 2024 set it on a path towards a $1.7 billion deficit , following primarily a mess-up over how many nurses it had and what they would cost; spending cuts reined that back to just over a billion by mid-2025. It said it prioritised protecting frontline services while it made cuts. It aims to break even in 2026-27. The plan said to understand what services were costing, it now had a financial procurement info system in place to track spending; plus it was bringing in a nationwide agreements and payments system. It had changed how it budgeted, to base budgets on what it wanted to do, rather than the other way around. "This change of approach will place service delivery for our patients front-and-centre, allow more accurate service planning for the year ahead, and help us to identify where cost and/or productivity improvements need to be made to meet our activity targets within budget." The Healthy Futures (Pae Ora) Amendment Bill repeals the requirement for future such health plans to be audited by the Auditor-General. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
