Therapeutic Patient Education in Transgender Care

Abstract

This communication visits the concept of therapeutic patient education (TPE), and explores its relevance to transgender health care. It suggests a novel term, therapeutic education (TE), and defines it as “educational activities essential to the optimization of health, offered by health care providers duly trained in the field of education, designed to help a transgender individual (or a group of individuals and their families) to manage their treatment and prevent avoidable complications, while maintaining or improving their quality of life. It describes the soft and hard skills required for TE, and suggests a classification that can help in structuring TE programs.