NHS England’s Medical Director for Specialised Services reports on the national review of specialised services for trans and non-binary people:

In the month that’s celebrates trans awareness across the world, I want to update you on the consultation on new service specifications for adult services, which took place over the summer.

The consultation lasted 14 weeks and during that time NHS England ran face-to-face events in Leeds, Cardiff and London, and a number of focus groups. In order to increase participation for people who could not attend an event in person we ran three webinars.

We also attended the Sparkle Weekend in Manchester and Trans Pride in Brighton.

The team’s experience of the events was of good and challenging debate, with some really meaningful contributions based on personal insight of the challenges that we face. I was pleased that we had good representation across the diverse trans and non-binary experience.

We had a high response rate – more than 800 people responded via the online survey and through written responses.

I am pleased that so many people got involved and I want to thank everyone who took time to come to one of our events or submit a response.

All of your responses are now being analysed by an independent third party organisation who will report on NHS England’s consultation, as well as NHS Scotland’s Gender Reassignment Surgical Service consultation, which ran at the same time.

The final report will be available in the New Year and this will be carefully considered by us, and we will seek advice from our relevant Clinical Reference Groups and external groups and organisations in forming the final versions of the service specifications.

Once we are clearer on the future shape of the service specifications, having considered the outcome of consultation, I will provide you with an update, including the plans for a process of national procurement to identify which organisations are best placed to deliver specialised gender identity services in the future.

I will also update you on our priority areas of work for 2018 including our intention to develop meaningful indicators of quality for surgical and non-surgical services.

If you would like to keep updated on NHS England’s work on gender identity services, you can register as a stakeholder of the Gender Identity Clinical Reference Group (adults) and the Paediatric Medicine Clinical Reference Group (children and young people). Or, if you have any questions or comments about the gender identity review, please get in touch england.scengagement@nhs.net or respond to this blog via the comments section below.

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