Lesley

One of the things, one of the frustrating things around the whole NHS system and the specialists for puberty blockers and cross sex hormones are, are provided and prescribed by GPs across the board for different reasons. So, and they don’t need to go to tertiary service. They need to go to a specialist service. In terms of the gender identity services that they can’t do that unless it goes through like a specialist provider, a specialist. And at the moment, because it’s all tied in with mental health that this mental health screening bit needs to happen first before young people, young adults can be prescribed hormones across or puberty blockers. And so there’s like these levels of gate keeping. And what was, what we really liberating about the other service was yeah, there was an assessment and it did take a good few months to do, because of [participant’s child’s name], my son’s complexities that there was that level of cooperation with the GP and the service that meant that actually as long as the, the bloods are being checked and reviewed on a fairly regular basis, which they are, that the GP has no issue with prescribing it, which is great. We never knew when the, although when we started off, this is going really convoluted, isn’t it. When we started on the referred first, the waiting list was 18 months. As time went on, the waiting list was getting longer and longer and longer. We didnt really know when we would be seen for our first appointment. We then knew that there was gonna be another six months at least of assessment before we got seen by the endocrinologist as part of the GIDS. I knew that if we didnt put things in place, my son wouldn’t be alive.