In my previous article I revealed how the National Gender Service (NGS) and its Model of Care (MoC) was created separately to the broad consultation process with both professional and patient groups. So, who was involved in the steering group creating the NGS and approving its MoC?
The patient’s voice
You’ll be happy to hear that this involved the voice of the trans community, which is important as this MoC is intended to provide for them. The MoC itself says so:
Not only that, the Project Initiation Document (PID) for the steering group indicates that there’ll be a meeting mapping out all the stakeholders:
And the Project Governance has a national sponsor who’ll ensure all relevant stakeholders are involved:
Even right in the Aim and Objectives of the PID it says that service users will have a voice at all stages:
And look, the PID says the MoC was developed with wide stakeholder involvement in January 2017:
Maybe not
Wait a second.
Wasn’t January 2017 when the Service Development Model led Dr. Philip Crowley was published? You know, the one that my previous article revealed involved consultation with patient organisations, but which this steering group decided to not go with? At least they’re happy to take the funding that this made available.
But I’m sure the national sponsor ensured that trans people would have a voice. I wonder who they were?
That’s a minor setback, but we can stay hopeful. Maybe we should look at the membership of the steering group:
Huh, it doesn’t look like there’s any trans representation among these 15 people. However, maybe this is an early draft, and they added people during the lifetime of the steering group. And, would you look at that, the 31 May 2018 minutes have them inviting someone!
Oh, that doesn’t look like trans representation either. However, the 28 June 2018 meeting’s agenda mentions representation from the Transgender Equality Network (TENI).
The good news however is that the meeting notes for 28 June 2018 mention 14 of the 15 items on the agenda. The bad news is that the item that was neglected in the meeting notes was the TENI representation.
The big day
The next meeting was listed as 6 September 2018 which is where the MoC was approved. Let’s see who was there:
So we have 10 people of the now 16 members of the steering group with Mr. Doody added. Of these 10, it is interesting that seven work for the Ireland East Hospital Group (IEHG) under which the NGS functions. By now we must accept that there was no trans representation in this process.
Of those listed present, the titles of only three of them indicate that they are doctors. So, who are these key doctors who approved this MoC?
As it happened, Dr. Feeney did get a mention in another of my FoIs in a document dated February 2021 in the context of who attended what meetings of the 2019 Steering Committee on the Development of HSE Transgender Identity Services:
Now what’s really interesting is that Dr. Paul Moran and Prof. Donal O’Shea are the other two doctors in the steering group meeting who approved the MoC. And who wrote the MoC they approved? The 2017 QID MoC helpfully provides an answer:
Jessica Black (she/it) regretfully informs you that this article only used 3 FoIs as sources, a 25% drop compared to previous levels.
Featured image via Facebook – This is Me
