Grant: Catayst Grant: Community-Led Res. on LGBTQIA/2S Wellness - Large-scale projects

2SLGBTQQIA+ people in Canada have unique needs and experience barriers within sexual and reproductive health care (SRHC), where many providers have little knowledge of our experiences, bodies, or sexual and reproductive health needs. During COVID-19, access to traditional in-person clinical care shifted dramatically. For 2SLGBTQQIA+ communities the pandemic exacerbated issues in access, while also introducing new options like virtual care. Access to in-person health services was reduced, there were greater challenges in accessing fertility clinics, abortion services, and surgical procedures, including gender affirming surgeries (considered non-urgent by the health system). At the same time, health care providers in many provincial contexts began providing virtual care, such as STBBI testing, HIV care and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) appointments. Led by the Community-Based Research Centre (CBRC), in collaboration with our project partners, we seek to identify 2SLGBTQQIA+ community needs, preferences, and acceptability of SRHC outside of traditional clinical settings, with a focus on community members who face intersecting forms of oppression; to understand the experiences, challenges and learnings of SRHC providers in non-traditional clinical care settings; and identify recommendations for policy and practice changes. Utilizing a community-based research approach, informed by decolonization, intersectionality and sex and gender based analysis (SGBA+), research activities are (a) secondary analysis of survey that CBRC have collected through its national 2SLGBTQQIA+ COVID-19 study; (b) English & French qualitative interviews with SRHC providers who support 2SLGBTQQIA+ communities; (c) English & French qualitative focus groups with 2SLGBTQQIA+ community members who have accessed SRHC; (d) development of resources to support the implementation of community-oriented approaches to proiding SRHC to 2SLGBTQQIA+ communities.