We know that most people working in the social care sector do so because they want to provide person-centred care. They want to support people who access their services to live fulfilled, independent and dignified lives.
Sometimes, though, supporting and working with people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT+) presents care workers with personal and professional challenges. Not through prejudice or discrimination, but through a lack of confidence or through an assumption that sexual orientation doesn’t affect care and support.
Skills for Care’s work on diversity during 2018/19 focuses on supporting the adult social care workforce to become more “confident with difference”.
Consider the times in which many older LGBT+ people grew up in; the historical context in which they “came out”; the prejudice and discrimination many LGBT+ people faced – and still face in many situations. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexual acts between two men (providing they were over 21). It wasn’t until 2010 that the Equality Act made discrimination against people on the basis of their sexuality in provision of goods and services, illegal. Gender incongruence (the World Health Organization term for people whose gender identity is different from the gender they were assigned at birth) has only just been moved out of the mental disorders classification by WHO.
Now imagine you’re an LGBT+ person in your 80s, feeling nervous and vulnerable, and accessing social care for the first time. Would you feel completely comfortable telling someone you don’t know very well about your sexuality or sexual orientation? What if you had to “come out” over and over again to different professionals? What if a professional made an assumption about your relationships – would you correct them? What if a professional said something offensive or discriminatory, would you risk opening up again?
Skills for Care wants to support care providers to meet the needs of all LGBT+ people. We want LGBT+ people to feel safe and supported. And we want to create a workforce that has the confidence and skills to make this happen.
LGBT+ people are not a homogenous group, just as heterosexual people aren’t. Everyone must be treated as an individual, but there are generalisations that might apply to LGBT+ people that could help you understand how to best offer support. For instance, LGBT+ older people are more likely to live alone than their non-LGBT+ peers and/or might be estranged from family. This will affect their support networks, and could also have an effect on who they want to be involved in their care and make decisions for them if they ever lose the capacity to do so.
To start off this area of work, we’ve revamped our Equality and diversity webpage, ready for more exciting resources and developments throughout the year.
Support for your service – what’s coming up?
This autumn, we’ll be hosting a series of events called Confident with Difference, where we’ll hear, first-hand, from people who identify as LGBT+. We will find out about their experiences and begin our journey to become more confident in supporting people from this community. We’ll also host a powerful, fictional play about a gay couple’s experience of dementia care that reflects many of the real-life experiences we’re told of.
Later in the year, we’ll be making some short films with LGBT+ people to understand their experiences of health and social care, hear their hopes for their future care, and learn from their recommendations for care providers. We’ll accompany these films with some learning materials to enable care providers to explore the themes of the videos with their workforce and make improvements to support people accessing services who identify as LGBT+.
Keep an eye on the new webpage and social media, and join our e-news mailing list, so you don’t miss out on these exciting events and resources.
