Jessica Halem on communicating with LGBTQ+ patients Part 1

I get to talk–and laugh, a lot–with Jessica Halem, MBA. We discuss communication with LGBTQ+ patients, improv, and her fancy article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Her insights are as powerful as her joy. 

You are in for a treat. Jessica Halem is a health communication expert who specializes in communicating with LGBTQ+ patients. I had so much fun interviewing her we went over time, and I had to split her interview into 2 episodes! And believe me, you won’t want to miss a word. 

Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, and this is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked #20 of Top 100 Podcasts in Social Sciences by Goodpods. HCP’s online course, Equitable Patient Education, promotes high-quality clinical practice in patient education by helping prevent avoidable errors. Learners say, There's a lot of eye-opening information I hadn't considered before. For more information, visit healthcommunicationpartners.com. 

When Jessica Halem and I sat down at the mic, the time just flew. In this first half of our chat, she drops so much knowledge you might actually want to take out a notepad. Her insights are as powerful as her joy. She talks about her recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine about how medicine itself has helped create and perpetuate LGBTQ health inequalities. And her message is one of encouragement, appreciation, and possibility. And she teaches us about improv! I’m so excited to share this with you. Here’s Jessica!

Anne Marie: I’m live via Zoom with Jessica Halem. Jessica has spent the past 25 years working in LGBTQ health. First as the executive director of the Lesbian Community Cancer Project in Chicago, to serving on the Board of GLMA which is the largest association of LGBTQ healthcare professionals, to now 10 years in academic medicine at Harvard Medical School and the University of Pennsylvania, teaching the next generation of healthcare providers how to care for LGBTQ patients. She currently serves on the Board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation where she built the LGBTQ+ Healthcare Directory. Jessica, welcome to the show.

Jessica: Oh, my goodness. She sounds fabulous. I can’t wait for her to join us. I love that. I love whoever she is. She sounds terrific.

AM: Jessica, thank you so much for agreeing to be on the show. And this is a real treat for me. We have the Penn connection, but then I also found out in our pre-roll talk that you have a history in improv. So I’m a little bit nervous because, oh, the last thing I can do is improv, the last thing I can do is be funny. So really, I’m just going to learn from you during this podcast.

J: Well, you know, the secret, the secret of improv is that they’re not funny, they’re just present. That’s the secret. I just taught you two years of improv into one nugget, which is: don’t worry about being funny, just stay present, and you’re already perfect.

I love this. I love this. Do you hear that, everybody? Do you hear that? Remember that.

Yeah.

All right, I’m jumping right into the questions that I ask all of our guests.

Great, great.

So what is an issue or problem you are facing related to patient communication or patient education?

Well, the problem I have been trying to address to improve patient communication, patient education, are those moments, those difficult moments, between a provider and