Embracing Diversity in Care: Caregiving and the LGBTQ+ Community (Part 2)

In honor of Pride Month, Trualta sat down with Michele Giordano, an executive at SAGE, the world’s oldest organization dedicated to advocacy, services, and innovations to ensure lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer and/or questioning (LGBTQ+) elders everywhere age with the dignity and respect they deserve. In this two-part blog series, Michele discusses with Trualta the unique challenges LGBTQ+ caregivers may face, and the innovative work SAGE is doing to help these caregivers.

In Part 1, we learned about caregiving and the LGBTQ+ community. Can you please tell us how SAGE helps family caregivers?

SAGE provides many resources and services to help caregivers who support LGBTQ+ older adults.

One way is through its SAGECare program, which creates more welcoming care for LGBTQ+ older adults. Since 88% of LGBTQ+ elders said they would feel more comfortable with long-term care services if they knew staff had explicitly been trained about the needs of LGBTQ+ patients, SAGE set out to help service providers create more LGBTQ+ welcoming organizations through its SAGECare program. SAGECare is a cultural competency training program for care providers who work with LGBTQ+ elders, from skilled nursing facilities and assisted living communities to hospice and palliative care. Through its comprehensive training programs, SAGECare empowers service providers to understand better and address the unique needs of LGBTQ+ elders, fostering environments of inclusivity and cultural competency.

Most recently, SAGECare celebrated a significant milestone: successfully training 250,000 participants and 1,000 organizations credentialed across the United States and internationally. This marked a pivotal moment in SAGE Care’s commitment to ensuring that care providers understand the needs of LGBTQ+ elders. SAGECare also provides a national database to help LGBTQ+ elders find a senior service provider with staff trained on LGBTQ+ elder cultural competency.

In addition to SAGECare, SAGE provides the first and only resource center dedicated to improving the lives of LGBTQ+ older adults: the National Resource Center on LGBTQ+ Aging. This resource provides the LGBTQ+ community with publications, fact sheets, guides, and assistance on nearly a thousand topics relevant to LGBTQ+ aging, including caregiving.

One of these resources is the Long-Term Care Equality Index (LEI), which promotes equitable and inclusive care for LGBTQ+ older people in residential long-term communities. With as many as 4.7 million LGBTQ+ older adults needing long-term care and support by 2030, SAGE created this first-of-its-kind national benchmarking tool to encourage and assist residential long-term care communities to embrace policies and practices that provide culturally competent care to LGBTQ+ older people. The LEI offers free resources and technical assistance to bring these policies and practices to life. The LEI is also valuable for LGBTQ+ older people and their loved ones to find equitable and inclusive care communities.

You can read Part 1 of the blog series here.