Johns Hopkins Nursing Evidence-Based Practice
Clinical practice guidelines are normally based on systematic reviews and they give the clinical practice some recommendations for evidence-based decision-making. The process of developing clinical practice guidelines involves a group of experts, researchers, and clinicians. Therefore, clinical practice guidelines helped the clinicians significantly during their practices. This paper seeks to analyze or appraise a journal article titled “Health Care Experiences of Lesbian Women: A Meta-synthesis” published in 2018 in the Advances in Nursing Science Journal by Marianne Snyder. According to the article, lesbians are likely to experience discrimination within the healthcare system leading to many navigating a heteronormative system. After exploring explicit and implicit attitudes towards lesbian among the nurses, medical doctors, and other health providers, we examined the correlation between ages. The targeted population was adults whose ages range from twenty-two and older. Test takers were asked about their gender, age, ethnicity, race and sexual identity, level of education, and demographic characteristics. While focusing on the public based on research, the hypothesis shows that on average, providers hold strong explicit preferences towards sexual orientation.
Ethical Review
The article did not give any ethical implications hence no ethical violation. The authors provided a clinical practice guideline that involved the management and evaluation of lesbian patients. The guideline has also developed recommendations that offer a recognized professional opinion for guiding members of a professional organization in matters concerning decision making
Analysis of findings
The clinical practice guidelines recommend that health care providers should take a detailed history of every patient. It also recommends that patients of the sexual minority group to be treated like any other patient who seeks medical attention. Additionally, the guideline suggests that the health facility evaluation and treatment be recommended for lesbian and sexual minority groups of patients.
Limitations
The sample of the study is representative of definable people and therefore the sample distribution was properly estimated hence no limitations. The diversity and size of the sample provide a unique opportunity of extension of findings of implicit preferences. There is sufficient evidence with consistent results since it was easy to determine how the nurse practitioners and doctors with foreign degrees classified their occupation. Additionally, the recommendation development is clearly defined since the data set had a measure of gender identity, which helped to detect the transgender participants. However, the mention of health care provider’s attitude toward transgender people focused on lesbian discrimination, as opposed to the CPG article published in 2018 focused on all patients despite their sexual orientation.
Discussion
Lesbian encounters various challenges while seeking quality health care. They often experience discrimination in the health care system, which makes them navigate a heteronormative system. Primary health care providers provide primary preventive, tertiary, and secondary health care services to lesbians without knowing their sexual orientation. However, some factors affect the perception of different healthcare between care providers and lesbians. Some studies done in the past decade show that lesbian discloses their sexual orientation freely are likely to get higher satisfaction care while in the previous study women report adverse experiences in health care (Snyder, 2019). Meta-synthesis offers a better understanding of lesbian healthcare experiences. In our research paper, the information was acquired from an online database search for scholarly, non-research appraisal. The developed recommendations on the research will guide in decision making for a matter of concern.
Application to Practice Specialty
Lesbian in almost all health care provider groups reports a moderate to strong explicit preferences to individuals who share their sexual identity. Correlation between explicit and implicit preferences are statistically important for almost all groups. Usually, when members of a sexual minority group seek medical care they experience biased treatment. Equally, members of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA) have reported observing discriminatory care by the providers to members of a sexual minority group. The guideline should be applied to various specialties of the different groups of patients. The GLMA can utilize the guideline to deliver health care to such patients. The guideline would also help to identify Health care providers whose attitude towards lesbian patients is displayed by their explicit attitude from the information provided by the patient who reports the matter (Tarricone & Rossler, 2019).
Future implications
Individual and historical factors may affect health across the life course. Sexual prejudice has changed many domains of society across demographic characteristics. Implicit preferences for sexual minority population is pervasive among most of the health care providers. The guideline article will help to examine ways that are likely to cause implicit biases. The article will help determine the link between clinical outcomes and implicit preferences. Therefore, the adoption of guidelines in the future study will also help examine how healthcare providers explicit and implicit preferences towards sexual orientation and if there is any potential harm to the delivery of health care to members of the lesbian and other sexual minority populations. It is advisable to evaluate and continue to improve sexual minority curriculum content for the clinical education program. Additionally, primary care guidelines developed will create an inclusive environment, staff training, and standards for patient-provider communication. Further the adoption of the guideline will play a critical role in improving health care for gays, lesbians, and members of the sexual minority population through assessing health care provider’s attitudes towards the transgender and bisexual people who are likely to experience health care disparities and stigma.
References
Synder, M. (2018). Health care experiences of lesbian: A meta-synthesis. Advances in Nursing Science, 0(0), 1-21.
Tarricone, I., & Rossler, A. (2019). Health and Gender: Resilience and Vulnerability Factors for Women’s Health in the Contemporary Society.