Elana Craemer, MD
Leah Centanni, FNP
UCI Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing faculty member Leah Centanni (FNP) and Family Medicine faculty member, Dr. Elana Craemer, recently received the UCI Inclusive Excellence Spirit Award Grant to support their efforts to ensure that the next generation of clinicians have the skills to care for the transgender community in a compassionate and respectful manner.
The UCI Inclusive Excellence Spirit Awards support faculty activities that promote equity, diversity, and inclusion within the UCI community as well as the larger community served by UCI. Professors Centanni and Craemer’s grant proposal identified the transgender community as one of the most vulnerable in Orange County in terms of many social factors that affect health such as workplace discrimination, low income status, and discrimination in the health care setting. In collaboration with Dr. Lynn Hunt at the Family Health Center (FHC) in Santa Ana, Professors Centanni and Craemer helped to establish the Adult Gender Affirming Clinic in 2017. Since then, they have worked with advocates at the Orange County LGBT Center to connect patients to gender affirming primary care at the Gender Affirming Clinic. On the education side, Professors Centanni and Craemer provide SON students and other clinical trainees with a rotation experience caring for transgender patients. “We welcome nursing and NP students to rotate with us during our Gender Affirming Clinic at FHC Santa Ana in order to teach affirming primary care and to model compassionate care,” says Dr. Craemer. “In addition, we are also setting up training sessions for nursing students and faculty on Transgender/Gender Non-binary Sensitivity Training.”
The funding from the UCI Inclusive Excellence Spirit Award will help to continue building and sustaining the interdisciplinary team and community partnership and promote a more inclusive community by teaching future nurses, staff and providers to be affirming, and compassionate when caring for the transgender community in Orange County. Professors Centanni and Dr. Craemer would like to acknowledge that Dr. Lynn Hunt, Dannie Cesena, Brit Cervantes, FHC Santa Ana, UCI Gender Diversity Program, and the Orange County LGBTQ Center were instrumental in building this collaborative interdisciplinary program.
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