We are calling on Magic City Wellness Center to expand access to gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy (HRT) by ensuring that all primary care providers are trained and supported to provide this essential aspect of healthcare.

For years, patients seeking HRT through the clinic have faced an extraordinarily long waitlist, reportedly exceeding 400 people. At present, only one provider is managing HRT for transgender patients, despite the clinic having multiple primary care providers that are currently capable of doing so. This is unfair because Magic City Wellness Center is intended to serve the healthcare of LGBTQ+ individuals, but under current practice, a cisgender heterosexual patient could receive care and access to Hormone Replacement Therapy significantly faster than a patient who identifies as transgender.

This bottleneck has real consequences not only for new patients but for current patients as well. Missing a single appointment due to work, illness, transportation issues, or other life circumstances can result in months of waiting before another appointment becomes available. These patients must then commit to being “on call” for the next available appointment with no idea when it will be. During that time, patients may go without hormone therapy and other necessary medications, all while having to maintain current bloodwork or risk the next appointment being canceled as well. 

Gender-affirming hormone therapy is a routine, evidence-based component of primary care. It should not be treated as an extremely limited specialty service when appropriate training and clinical guidelines exist to enable primary care providers to safely prescribe and monitor treatment.

Under the clinic's current model, transgender patients requiring hormone replacement therapy are referred to a single provider for their ongoing HRT care; even though other primary care providers prescribe hormone therapy for patients who do not identify as transgender without having to wait months for an appointment. This has created substantial delays in access to care. We believe training and authorizing additional providers to manage gender-affirming HRT would improve continuity of care, reduce wait times, and better serve the needs of transgender patients. 

At a time when transgender people are under attack at the highest levels, including from the President and his administration, these barriers to care can push trans patients to crisis. 

Adminstrators and care providers at Magic City Wellness Center are aware of these issues but have yet to adapt to the growing demand for gender-affirming care. 

Expanding HRT services would not only improve patient outcomes and continuity of care, but would also allow the clinic to serve more patients, reduce wait times, and strengthen its mission of providing comprehensive, affirming healthcare to the LGBTQ+ community and even potentially increase revenue.

We respectfully ask Magic City Wellness Center to:

1. Train all primary care providers to competently prescribe and monitor gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy, including support for providers as they apply for  appropriate DEA licenses in order to be able to support Trans Masc patients, and offer to assign current patients to their preferred PCP for HRT.
2. Improve scheduling flexibility so patients who miss appointments can be rescheduled within a reasonable timeframe.
3. Train all providers to understand and navigate Informed Consent practices in order to reduce wait time for patients seeking to start HRT.
4. Create a patient advisory board that includes a diverse group of members that receive care at the clinic, in order to ensure patients, providers, and administration can coordinate and provide valuable input to policy surrounding patient care. 
   
   Access to gender-affirming healthcare should not depend on the availability of a single provider. Every transgender patient deserves timely, compassionate, and uninterrupted medical care.

The goal of these changes is to assist MCWC to better fulfill its mission.

Mission:

The mission of the Magic City Wellness Center is to provide wellness and medical care for the community in a safe, welcoming and affirming environment. 

We believe that by implementing these changes at MCWC…

Everybody wins.