TASHRA's Core Competencies: The Development and Introduction: of Clinical Competencies for the Treatment of Kink Populations

Abstract

ABSTRACT Introduction Kink practitioners face mainstream stigma (Newmahr, 2010; Silva, 2015) and pathologizing (Moser, 2016, 2018; Weinberg, 2006) and stigma from health providers (Hoff & Sprott, 2009; Kolmes, Stock, & Moser, 2006; Kolmes & Witherspoon, 2012). These experiences of discrimination contribute to health disparities and poor clinical outcomes for kinksters (Sprott& Randall, 2017; Sprott et al., 2017; Waldura et al., 2016). Cultural competence guidelines help physical and mental health clinicians in preventing this stigma and discrimination (Beach et al., 2005; Butler et al., 2016). In 2021, The Alternative Sexualities Health Research Alliance (TASHRA) created cultural competence guidelines for clinicians serving kink populations. This presentation will briefly present these guidelines and the research and clinical foundations that they are built upon, including preliminary findings from the ongoing 2021 International Kink Health Survey (IKHS). To our knowledge, these are the first cultural competence guidelines developed specifically for working with kink and grounded in both extensive clinical experience and research. These guidelines are based on five primary data sets. First, the preliminary Kink Health Project was a qualitative study conducted in 2015 (n = 115) that identified injuries and health concerns of kink individuals (Waldura et al., 2016). Building on this, the 2016 Kink Health Survey studied kink-involved US adults (n = 1,118). Health disparities higher than national averages noted in this study included 4.1% reported being HIV positive (10x higher), 24% reported attempting suicide (5x higher), 17.98% reported a diagnosis of PTSD (2.6x higher), experiences of stigma hindered healthcare access (19%), and past negative experiences with providers increased the odds 4x of delaying or avoiding health interventions (Sprott & Randall, 2017; Sprott et al., 2021). Third, the 2019 Clinical Practice Guidelines (Moser et al., 2019) was developed after several rounds of feedback from the kink community and specialist providers. Utilizing this feedback, this team designed these guidelines to add to the literature on what constitutes best practices in working with kink populations. Fourth, the preliminary results from the ongoing 2021 IKHS continue to be utilized in refining these cultural competency standards. This study builds upon the prior literature and studies an international audience of 2,000+ participants. The survey is a mixed methods design that has been rigorously constructed by a team of volunteers to cover a wide array of topics in kink healthcare. Finally, these guidelines emerged from decades of clinical practice with the kink population by the diverse array of TASHRA volunteers. Objective Be familiar with the clinical need for cultural competency standards Understand the research base for TASHRA's recently developed kink core cultural competencies Be familiar with the TASHRA foundational, basic, and advanced core cultural competencies for working with kink populations Methods N/A Results N/A Conclusions N/A Disclosure No