London, July 29 (EFE). – The only clinic in the UK dedicated to the care of minors suspected of having gender dysphoria will close in the spring of 2023 and be replaced by regional centers with specialists from various fields ensuring a more ‘holistic’ ‘service’ for patients.
This is the decision by NHS England in response to the initial report published last February by Dr Hilary Cass, who found serious shortcomings in the Identity and Gender Development service at London’s Tavistock Clinic, after several complaints from affected parties. and staff.
NHS England explains in a statement that as a first step in transforming its service for under-18s, it will launch a new center in London and another in Manchester (Northern England), where there will be professionals from various branches including psychiatrists, pediatricians, autism and neurodiversity specialists.
These centers will be linked to children’s hospitals and prestigious academic institutions for the latest advances in gender research, so that they can be appropriately evaluated, for example, when starting puberty prevention therapies.
NHS England commissioned the report from Cass in September 2020, after “the discovery of a significant increase in the number of patients referred” by general practitioners, from 250 in 2011-12 to more than 5,000 in 2021-22, causing long waiting lists.
In addition, a change was noted in the type of children and adolescents requesting the service, with an “increase in those who were recorded as female at birth” and in cases of “neurological diversity and other mental health problems.”
Several people also reported that some practitioners at the Tavistock Clinic, which was founded in 1989, prescribed treatments prematurely and without the necessary basis, which was revealed in June 2020 by the BBC’s Newsnight.
Cass concluded in his interim analysis that it was “not feasible or safe” to have a single specialist clinic across the UK and that the current treatment model puts young people at risk of “stress and effects on their mental health”.
LGBT advocacy group Stonewall has praised the opening of new centers to tackle “unacceptable” waiting lists.
For her part, Kira Bell, who has sued the London clinic, said its closure is positive “so that other children do not follow the same path you do”, she told the BBC.
Bell sued, arguing that doctors had not sufficiently questioned her decision to change her gender from woman to man, which she later regretted. EFE
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