Guest Column by Abigail Swartz | Penn Nursing needs to require a class on LGBTQ healthcare
Nurses have a responsibility as health care providers to administer holistic care to their patients. Holistic care is a philosophy dating back to the 1850s — spearheaded by Florence Nightingale — that emphasizes caring for the patient as a whole, not just their physical body. It is one of the very first concepts that nursing students at Penn are taught. It is ingrained into the nursing practice to ensure that we care for the patient’s mental, emotional, and physical health equally. However, we cannot properly care for patients of diverse backgrounds if we are not adequately educated. A majority of our classes either assume that all of our patients are going to be cisgender and heterosexual, or perform the bare minimum of education regarding LGBTQ patients.