Dr. Meagan Duncan: Creating PT Safe Spaces for the LGBTQ+ Community

In this episode, Physical Therapist at Kelly Hawkins Physical Therapy, Meagan Duncan, talks about creating safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community.

Today, Meagan talks about trauma-informed care, navigating trauma during the subjective exam, and the importance of consent. How can PTs make clinics safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community?

Hear about the discrimination faced by the LGBTQ+ community, doing community advocacy work, and get Meagan’s advice to her younger self, all on today’s episode of The Healthy, Wealthy & Smart Podcast.

Key Takeaways

• “Gay men can undergo sexual violence at twice the rate of straight men. 50% of transgender people will experience some kind of sexual violence in their life. It’s even more if they’re a minority.”
• “Being trauma-informed is important in any discipline because you don’t know what somebody has been through.”
• “I think it’s about really small gestures.”
• “Starting with paperwork, gender has every option you can think of. If it’s a paper form, gender’s a blank space.”
• “We have small flag stickers for every flag that you can think of with all the colours that represent different parts of the LGBTQ+ community.”
• “Be more vigilant about asking for consent.”
• “Asking for consent is something that should be ongoing and all the time.”
• “Education is a big part of asking for consent, because in order to consent to something, people have to understand what it’s going to entail.”
• “Providing options Is a really important part of consent.”
• “It’s not patient-directed care. It’s patient-centred care.”
• “Don’t just go around touching people without consent.”
• “Find a niche. If you can find a niche that you are passionate about and that is needed, you are never going to struggle for work or for satisfaction.”

More about Meagan Duncan

Meagan Duncan is a Chicagoland native who earned an associate degree as a Physical Therapist Assistant in 2013 from Kankakee Community College. She then worked for six years in an orthopaedic setting while earning a Bachelor's in Interdisciplinary Studies from Governor State University in Illinois. Later, she moved to Las Vegas to earn her Doctor of Physical Therapy degree from the University of Nevada Las Vegas in 2020.

As a PTA, she developed and ran a pro bono clinic at her first post grad job in her hometown of Joliet, Illinois. She now practices in Las Vegas and specializes in pelvic health after completing a specialty clinical rotation with the VA Hospital in Las Vegas.

Duncan currently works at Kelly Hawkins Physical Therapy, a prominent outpatient physical therapy company in the Las Vegas area. At Kelly Hawkins, she built a successful pelvic health program that she has overseen and grown over the past year and a half.

Duncan also works for NPTE Final Frontier, a premier national physical therapy exam preparation company that works with domestic and foreign trained students to help them pass the board exam. In this role, she tutors PT and PTA exam candidates and assists them with content development. She advocates for students and professionals to balance life outside of physical therapy.

Outside of her profession, Duncan enjoys hiking, biking, paddleboarding and anything she can do outdoors with her husband and dog. She is excited to welcome a new addition to her family soon, as her first child is due in a month.

Suggested Keywords

Healthy, Wealthy, Smart, Physiotherapy, LGBTQ+, Inclusion, Trauma, Pain, Discrimination, Sexual Violence, Advocacy, Consent, Pelvic Health,

To learn more, follow Meagan at:

Email:              mduncan@kellyhawkins.com

Website:          https://www.kellyhawkins.com

LinkedIn:         Meagan Duncan

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Read the Full Transcript Here: 

00:02

Hey Megan, welcome to the podcast. I'm happy to have you on.

00:06

Hey, Karen, awesome to be here. Thank you for having me.

00:09

Yes. And like I said in the intro, today, we're going to be talking about creating physical therapy space, a safe spaces for the LGBTQ plus community. So before we talk a little bit more about that, can you let the listeners know where your passion for this community comes from?

00:27

For um, so I guess I feel like I'm just kind of a fan of the underdog in any situation. And I can't say that I have personally experienced, like so much in this community, aside from having a lot of relationships with people, and seeing what they go through and what life looks like on that side of our world, because it's a very different experience from what I've had as a heterosexual, white female. So when I was in high school, I just kind of ended up best friends with a gay man. And he kind of brought me into the circle of his friends, which ended up being just a really large, wonderful welcoming circle of people on all spectrums of the LGBTQ plus community. So I got really interested in just kind of gay rights and things like that went to marches and did all of that. Tried to advocate for the community as whatever I need to do as a 16 year old, which was not very much. And now I found myself in this position that I can do something which is awesome. And it's not even necessarily something I thought about when I went into the niche that I'm in. But I am really happy to be able to finally say that there's like some baggage behind this lifelong commitment that I kind of said that I had towards the community, but was never really doing anything about it other than like, your like Facebook posts here and there that talk about, you know, advocacy or supporting a community that's not well supported. So I'm happy to be able to do something about it now.

01:56

And let's talk about what you can do, or what we can do as physical therapists to help support this community, because I'm sure a lot of people may be listening to this and say, Well, what does the community need? That's so different from the rest of of other communities? So what is it about this community in particular, that perhaps they're more exposed to certain things? Or do they not get the care that they need? So go ahead, I'll pass the mic over to you.

02:27

Yeah, absolutely. So just discrimination in general, it's a problem in so many realms of social issues, being gender and sexual preference, of course, is one of those huge ones. So people feeling like or actually having less access to healthcare, getting denied health care, or getting given less than optimal treatment, or not really getting the best of their provider because of discrimination or because of biases that those providers have. Likewise, they might be afraid to go to facilities or go get treatments for things that are going through because they've experienced poor care before. So my niche actually, is pelvic floor physical therapy. And in this, there is so much that I can do for the community and physical therapists as well. And I was thinking about this podcast and thinking, what actually makes my job so different from the way everybody should be treating everyone. And I think there's a lot to learn, aside from just treating in pelvic floor PT. But in pelvic floor PT, I see a lot of people in the community because they are much more exposed to sexual violence and sexual trauma. And that correlates really significantly with pelvic floor dysfunctions. So we know from studies that gay men can undergo sexual violence at twice the rate of straight men, transgender people will usually experience about 50% of people will experience some kind of sexual violence in their life, which is a huge number 50%. And then it's even more if they're a minority. So that's a huge community of people where like, most of them need our help or need pelvic floor PT, or need more support than they're getting. So I think that we can play a big role in advocating for people and making spaces where they feel like are welcome. Or be that person that they ca