Wendy Craven

Optometrist and director of Craven & Murray Opticians. Vice Chair of Greater Manchester East LOC Committee

As a practice, we want to deliver the best service and experience to all of our patients. As an active member of our community, we want to use our voice to promote LGBT awareness through Pride in Practice and be inclusive for all of our clients.

Whilst we would always describe our practice as being inclusive, it wasn’t until we took part in the PIP training that we became aware of the issues the LGBT community faced when attending healthcare providers. Just because we would describe ourselves as inclusive doesn’t mean that’s how we are perceived by LGBT community.

Our practice was awarded for excellence in LGBT healthcare so by displaying our Pride in Practice certificate and adapting certain things within our practice we hope our LGBT clients feel welcome and supported within our practice. The certificate being displayed also stimulates conversation with the rest of our clients.

As a team, we really benefitted from the Pride in Practice training around LGBT awareness. However, we were disappointed to hear some of the examples of poor treatment in healthcare experienced by the LGBT community the training. It made us realise that as an optometry practice we could make some small changes that would make a big difference. We now don’t label our frames as women’s & men’s and that’s not really a big change for us but could make a difference to the overall experience of an LGBT client.

I don’t think there is any service industry that wouldn’t benefit from becoming more LGBT aware.