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    2021 ORR Community Service Award Winner: Kevin Nguyen, MD

    Dr. Nguyen is a child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He is a champion of providing comprehensive, affirming, and complete care to LGBTQ+ youth and has served as an organizational exemplar and leader. Dr. Nguyen developed a longitudinal curriculum for his fellow residents in best practices for providing care of LGBTQ+ youth, and over time recruited two additional residents to champion the work. The curriculum was accepted as a workshop at the 2020 Association of Pediatric Program Directors National Meeting. The analysis results of the curriculum’s impact on trainees, and an accompanying workshop were also accepted at the 2021 Pediatric Hospital Medicine National Meeting.

    Recognizing gaps in care, and with encouragement and support from fellow colleagues Dr. Nguyen continued to move forward, and interest in his curriculum began to gain traction. With hundreds of hours of volunteer time he began offering recommended best practices throughout the organization to a broader care team to include: 

    • Social Work
    • Interpreter Services
    • Child Life
    • Spiritual Care Services
    • Medical Staff
    • Acute care Nursing
    • Perioperative Nursing
    • Pediatric and visiting residents
    • Medical students

    What began as a resident’s scholarly project quickly grew into much more as Dr. Nguyen became recognized as an organizational leader in LGBTQ+ health. His competence, approachability, flexibility, and willingness to make himself available at literally all hours, days off, post-call and vacation to answer colleague and faculty questions regarding how to best care for LGBTQ+ youth, speaks to his passion for LGBTQ+ care. Dr. Nguyen exemplifies excellence in all that he does, and he is the consummate ally and advocate. He never becomes frustrated or impatient, and always takes the time to calmly listen and clearly explain himself.

    Dr. Nguyen served as a subject matter expert for operationalizing clinical tools supporting best practices for LGBTQ+ youth when his organization transitioned to the EPIC electronic health record system. He specifically targeted areas with demonstrable, meaningful improvements in outcomes. He measured knowledge, comfort, and attitudes pre and post completion of his curriculum and saw statistically as well as clinically meaningful improvements in his colleagues' knowledge of and comfort with the provision of LGBTQ+ and gender-affirming care. He has worked with nearly every patient-facing group in the organization, including registration, to ensure that each clinical encounter begins on an affirming note. His work around optimizing the EHR experience and documentation of sexuality and gender identity has been directly linked to improved documentation of gender identity. Dr. Nguyen has continued to serve as a provider of gender-affirming care, including hormonal therapy and subspecialty referral – in fact, he is one of very few providers in the geographic catchment area who provides this type of care, and has trained multiple colleagues to be comfortable prescribing hormonal therapy and making referrals.