NHS at risk of “going backwards” on trans healthcare, expert warns
NHS England’s new gender identity services could be a “regression” of what was offered at the Tavistock, a leading expert in the field has warned.
Next month, Great Ormond Street in London and Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool will be the new homes of such services in England and Wales.
The sites will replace the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), which is run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust, after it closes at the end of March.
They are the first of what NHS England hopes will eventually be several regional gender identity centres across the country, but Dr Aidan Kelly, a clinical psychologist who worked at GIDS from 2016 to 2021, is sceptical of what this could look like in practice. “The problem I have is not the proposed plan,” he tells GAY TIMES. “It’s the reality.” “The pressures and strains are going to be the same” It was announced in 2022 that GIDS would be closing after more than three decades as a result of criticism from an independent review and being deemed “inadequate” by inspectors who visited in late 2020.
