Accept, a Romanian NGO that advocates for the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in Romania, recently launched a database of LGBTQIA-friendly doctors in the country designed to ease access to healthcare, reports Romania Insider.
The database includes numerous doctors of various specializations, including family doctors, endocrinologists, gynecologists, psychiatrists, dermatologists, dentists, infectious disease specialists, urologists, and others. Accept encourages members of the community of sexual minorities from all over the country to “call with confidence when they want to access specialized services and want to be respected and feel safe.”
The NGO gathered the list of doctors through a form disseminated among the LGBTQIA community. „Through this form, people from the community could give us recommendations for doctors, especially from Bucharest and Muntenia. The Accept team and volunteers then contacted the recommended doctors and asked them if they wanted to appear in the database, either publicly or privately, upon request”, the organization states on its website.
Accept’s database includes the name of the doctors, their specializations, the cities in which they work, the clinics in which they practice, whether these are private or public, and whether or not the doctors work within the national health insurance framework.
Aside from the public database, a list of additional names can be sent by Accept upon request. Similar databases created by NGOs concerned with the rights of sexual minorities such as Identity.Education, PRIDE România and Rise Out cover other cities and regions in Romania.
Despite their best efforts, Accept and other associations cannot ensure a pleasant experience for LGBT patients in need of care. If rejected or treated badly, patients are encouraged to address the NGOs.
Romania decriminalized homosexuality in 2001, decades later than some other European Union countries. The last person to be imprisoned for being queer was released in 1998, according to RFE. Gay rights advocates say that LGBTQIA people still face hostility and discrimination in Romania, but that society is slowly changing. In 2018, a referendum seeking to amend the constitution and ban same-sex marriage did not pass due to low turnout.
