HEALTH
Study to Follow Patients After Gender-Affi rming Surgery
National Institutes of Health allocates $3.4 billion to study up to 300 people
BY MATT TRACY
A forthcoming fi ve-year
study funded by the
federal government is
aiming to fi ll gaps in
research surrounding the experiences
of individuals following gender
affi rming surgery.
The Visiting Nurse Service of
New York (VNSNY) and the Center
for Home Care Policy and Research
landed a $3.4 million grant from
the National Institutes of Health to
study up to 300 trans and non-binary
individuals for 18 months after
they undergo surgery. The research
will be co-led by Miriam Ryvicker, a
senior research scientist for Visiting
Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY),
and Walter Bockting, director of
the program for the Study of LGBT
Health at the Columbia University
School of Nursing and Department
of Psychiatry.
Miriam Ryvicker (pictured) and Shannon Whittington kickstarted the idea behind their research project
during conversations over lunch and dinner.
Researchers intend to track participants’
psychosocial development,
relationships, support systems, employment
and fi nancial status, and
VNSNY
physical, mental, sexual, social
health, among other factors.
The idea to embark on such a
project emerged several years ago
over the course of lunch and dinner
conversations between Ryvicker
and Shannon Whittington, who
heads up VNSNY’s Gender Affi rmation
Program (GAP). VNSNY
provides home-based care, and
the agency’s GAP program offers
specialized care for patients who
have undergone gender-affi rming
surgery.
The GAP program features
“hand-selected” clinicians who are
trained in caring for individuals
after surgery — and those involved
in leading that program started to
notice that while existing research
has covered the experiences of
folks in the time leading up to surgery,
there has long been a need
to study how people fare after surgery.
“I started wondering — after we
discharge patients, what happens
to them?” Whittington said. “I’ve
had nurses call and ask me, ‘I wonder
how they’re doing. Were they
able to get back into society?'”
Ryvicker and Whittington sought
to address that gap by seeking out
new avenues of research. They
started small, but suddenly found
themselves thinking about a much
larger project than they initially
anticipated.
“I looked for a foundation funder
that might be interested — but I
couldn’t quite fi nd a fi t in terms of
the foundation that might fund an
actual research study,” Ryvicker
said. “There were foundations I
could fi nd and doing work in this
area, but not research per se.”
They then set their sights on the
NIH, and, according to Ryvicker,
“that was kind of where it went
from this idea of a smaller study to
reaching out wider.”
The application for the research
effort was submitted to the NIH in
2019, followed by revisions and resubmissions.
It was fi nally funded
this summer and researchers are
currently in the preliminary stages
of getting the project off the ground.
Participants will be recruited
for the project from VNSNY’s GAP
program and will be interviewed at
the three-month, 12-month, and
18-month checkpoints. There will
be participants from across the
city as well as the surrounding areas,
and patients will be enrolled
every month for several years.
Researchers are stressing that
providers are in need of more education
in order to equip themselves
with the tools they need to best serve
trans and non-binary patients. That
could wind up being a key factor in
the results of the study.
“Barriers to healthcare for transgender
and non-binary individuals
include a lack of trust based
on previous negative experiences,
and a lack of healthcare providers
trained in sensitively addressing
their specifi c needs,” Bockting explained
in a written statement to
Gay City News. “How will surgery
affect their encounters with primary
care and specialty providers?
Does the trust established during
their time at GAP extend beyond
the immediate post-surgical period
into subsequent experiences with
the healthcare system? What are
the unique needs for services and
support of transgender and non-binary
people during the years after
surgery? The information gathered
from participants in this study will
allow us to answer these types of
questions and more.”
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