Lena Queen | Why Supporting Healthcare Staff Is the Key to LGBTQIA+ Health Equity

This is not simply about individual resilience. Queen frames provider burnout as a structural problem – one driven by a healthcare system that demands constant productivity while failing to adequately support the people doing the work.

Queen also highlights how discrimination and microaggressions affect LGBTQIA+ healthcare workers directly, adding an extra layer of stress that colleagues in other areas of healthcare may not experience. This matters because burnt-out providers are less able to offer the kind of careful, compassionate, personalised care that marginalised communities need most.

A key idea running through the paper is intersectionality – the understanding that people hold multiple identities at once, and that these shape their experiences in ways that cannot be separated out. A Black transgender woman, for example, does not face discrimination simply as a Black person or as a transgender person, but as the specific combination of both.

Providers who cannot grasp this complexity, Queen argues, risk doing harm even with the best of intentions.

To address burnout, Queen draws on body-based wellness practices – including breathing techniques, gentle movement, and grounding exercises – as practical tools for recovery rather than abstract ideals.

But individual effort is not enough. Queen is clear that healthcare organisations must step up too, offering supervision, peer support, and meaningful training. Looking after providers, they argue, is inseparable from looking after patients.