Depending on where a patient is located in Canada, wait times for gender-affirming care can be months to years — a precarious position for people who are already struggling with their mental health, experts say.
Meanwhile, advocates worry that heightened political rhetoric surrounding gender-affirming care for youth could further strain availability within a health-care system that is already under-resourced.
Foria Clinic — a privately run, virtual-only service — wants to help reduce those wait times.
It was born out of the Ontario-based Connect Clinic, a similar online service founded in 2019 by Dr. Kate Greenaway that aimed to make gender-affirming care more accessible for patients in rural parts of the province. Changes to the provincial funding formula in 2022 meant the clinic had to close shop, leaving 1,500 patients — and 2,000 more on the waitlist — without a gender-affirming care physician.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Kit Sparrow was faced with two options when he sought out gender-affirming care: wait months for a specialist appointment, or pay out of pocket for a privately run, virtual service.
Depending on where a patient is located in Canada, wait times for gender-affirming care can be months to years — a precarious position for people who are already struggling with their mental health, experts say.
It was born out of the Ontario-based Connect Clinic, a similar online service founded in 2019 by Dr. Kate Greenaway that aimed to make gender-affirming care more accessible for patients in rural parts of the province.
After her clinic’s closure, Greenaway joined Calgary-based health-care startup PurposeMed, which bills itself as “improving access to complex care for underserved communities,” to start Foria.
“For trans and non-binary people, that lack of access to care can affect every aspect of their life, including their ability to be effectively employed and to succeed in their careers, and to avoid discrimination and violence and harassment,” she said.
The government is also recruiting at least one medical professional specializing in gender-affirming surgeries to practise in Alberta, creating a registry of gender-care specialists and developing a pilot project that will offer counselling services for youth and their parents, they said.
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