Former HHS Head Sebelius Accepts LGBT Medical Professionals Award
On Thursday, September 11, the Honorable Kathleen Sebelius, 21st U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services, will be honored with the GLMA Achievement Award during GLMA's 32nd Annual Conference in Baltimore, MD (September 10-13 at the Sheraton Inner Harbor).
"As Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius' leadership on LGBT health and equality was unparalleled," said GLMA President Henry Ng. "The LGBT community is grateful to her and we are honored she will join us next week to accept the GLMA Achievement Award."
More than 400 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) health professionals and allies are expected during the four-day conference, recognized as the world's largest and premier LGBT health conference.
GLMA's Achievement Awards recognize outstanding contributions to the LGBT community for exemplary commitment to improving the quality of health services for LGBT people, improving the environment for LGBT healthcare workers or for contributing significantly to gains made by the LGBT civil rights movement.
Sebelius, who served as HHS Secretary from 2009 until earlier this year, oversaw and led a rapid transformation in how the federal government addressed the health and well-being of LGBT people. Under her leadership and in partnership with President Obama, HHS began to implement many of the initiatives LGBT health advocates had been asking for decades, including:
� Creation of the Department-wide LGBT Issues Coordinating Committee to address LGBT health concerns;
� Enhanced data collection on LGBT health, including adding sexual orientation questions to the National Health Interview Survey;
� Regulations ensuring equal hospital visitation for same-sex couples;
� Significant funding for programs addressing LGBT health, including trainings for community health centers and a national resource center on LGBT aging;
� The groundbreaking report on LGBT health from the Institute of Medicine, commissioned by the National Institutes of Health;
� Inclusion of LGBT health issues for the first time in Healthy People 2020 and the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health Care (CLAS); and
� Ensuring transgender people are included in nondiscrimination provisions enforced by the HHS Office of Civil Rights.
The department also worked to ensure the Affordable Care Act was similarly inclusive of LGBT communities by ensuring nondiscrimination in insurance plans offered through the marketplaces, eliminating denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions and treating married same-sex couples equally to their opposite-sex counterparts, among other provisions.
The former secretary joins a distinguished group of recipients of the 2014 GLMA Achievement Award. Previous recipients of the award include now-Senator Tammy Baldwin, Representative John Lewis and former Representatives Barney Frank and Hilda Solis.
For a complete list of speakers, award recipients and programming, visit www.glma.org/conference.