Only a few hospitals in the United States perform gender reassignment surgery and Boston Medical Center is about to join this elite—though expanding—roster. In doing so, it’s also becoming the first medical facility in Massachusetts to perform the procedures.
In late summer 2016, the hospital is slated to begin providing male-to-female surgery, and aims to expand its services to include the more complicated female-to-male surgeries as soon as possible thereafter. The procedures will be available to patients who are 18 and older and have lived in their new gender for at least one year.
“The demand for care from the transgender community is significant and has not been met,’’ said Dr. Joshua Safer, an endocrinologist and medical director of Boston Medical Center’s new Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, in a recent Boston Globe article. “It’s a community that has been neglected for years and years.’’
Reports the Globe:
The hospital cares for 300 to 400 transgender patients and refers to the surgery as “gender affirmation surgery”—to underscore that the surgery gives patients the appearance of the gender they identify with.
Without a local program, “we just didn’t know what do to with these patients’’ who want surgery, said Dr. Jaromir Slama, the plastic surgeon who will perform the procedures with urologist Dr. Robert Oates. Along with Michigan and Maryland — up until now, the only two comprehensive programs at teaching hospitals — there are a dozen or more surgeons in Arizona, California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania who offer gender reassignment surgery, many in private clinics. But the distance from Boston can be challenging, particularly if complications occur.
During the 1960s and 1970s, dozens of US hospitals provided medical treatment to transgender people, including surgery, but Medicare stopped covering most care in the 1980s amid a backlash. Nearly all the programs closed, Green said.
Medicare lifted that restriction in 2014, and many state Medicaid programs followed, including Massachusetts that same year. The private insurer Harvard Pilgrim Health Care said it has covered gender reassignment surgery since 2010, while Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts began paying for it two years ago.
The primary teaching affiliate for Boston University School of Medicine, Boston Medical Center is a private, non-profit medical center located in the city’s South End. With its commitment to providing accessible health care to everyone, it is the largest safety-net hospital and busiest trauma and emergency services center in New England.
