Rural LGBT Health Disparities and Implications for Behavioral Health Treatment
Dani E. Rosenkrantz, MS, EdS, University of Kentucky, & Melissa Zook, MD, FAAFP, AAHIVS, London Women’s Care

This presentation will outline the research on health and health care of rural sexual and gender minorities, with insight into three levels of influences that are important to understand rural behavioral health service delivery.  These include knowledge of actual mental health disparities and risk behaviors present in rural LGBT populations, awareness of factors influencing client and provider relationships, and systems level factors such as discrimination and rural culture. This presentation will share clinical insights from the presenters’ work with rural Appalachian primary care lesbian and gay patients, LGBT Veterans, LGBT students, HIV patients, and transgender patients, as well as from advocating for LGBT health and training staff on cultural sensitivity.  Practical recommendations will center on ways to address LGBT identity and safety with rural LGBT individuals and how to provide treatment while working in systems that create barriers to LGBT health care.

Learning Objective 1:
Outline the research on rural LGBT health disparities
Learning Objective 2:
Describe ways to address identity and articulate safety to rural LGBT patients
Learning Objective 3:
Give examples of ways to work within challenging integrated practice systems.

Intermediate level

BIOS

Dani E. Rosenkrantz, MS, EdS, received her EdS in Counseling Psychology from the University of Kentucky, where she is currently a doctoral candidate. Dani is the Safezone trainer for UK LGBTQ* Resource Center and a member of the Psychosocial Research Initiative on Sexual Minorities and Sexual Health Promotion research labs.  Dani’s work focuses on the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ people and their families, faith, sexual health promotion, and ally development. Dani has worked as a clinician in diverse settings, including a university counseling center, an inpatient substance abuse treatment facility for women, a family trauma assessment center, and the Lexington VA. While Lexington itself is a small city, many of the clients served in these settings are individuals from or living in rural environments. Clinical interests include interpersonal process therapy, culturally mindful care, identity development, and client empowerment.  Dani is principal author of: Health and health care of rural sexual and gender minorities: A systematic review, in Stigma and Health (2016).  

Melissa Zook, MD, FAAFP, AAHIVS, received her MD from the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine. She is a family physician with London Women’s Care, a rural health clinic in London, Kentucky. She completed a family medicine residency at the Moses H. Cone Hospital in Greensboro, North Carolina and a clinical HIV fellowship through the Southeast AIDS Education Center in conjunction with Emory University and the University of Kentucky. Her clinical interests include addiction, HIV, Hepatitis C, and GLBT health and mental health. Dr. Zook has been practicing medicine for fifteen years working in rural, underserved communities. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians and past President of the Kentucky Academy of Family Physicians and is on the adjunct community faculty of both the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville. She has spoken and written frequently on her experiences as a rural family physician.