Contact: Dylan Kneale

Modelling the health and care trajectories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people is essential to identify health inequalities and support needs. However, because of the small number of LGBT people in any one dataset or source, current evidence tends to rely on studies that have poor generalisability. This lack of evidence results in knowledge gaps for decision-makers seeking to plan health and care services for LGBT people. This project utilises individual participant meta-analyses, which combine power from multiple datasets to facilitate robust modelling of health and care trajectories for LGBT people. Our focus initially will be on older LGBT people in the UK, with the aim of ultimately strengthening our understanding of LGBT health and care trends across other age groups and settings.

This work is being led by researchers at the EPPI Centre (Dr Dylan Kneale and Professor James Thomas) and involves researchers at Cardiff University (led by Dr Rob French) and policy specialists at the International Longevity Centre-UK (led by Sally-Marie Bamford). The project is supported by a Wellcome Trust seed award as part of its sexuality and health themed call.

Scoping Review Protocol

The scoping review described here aims to informing later stages of the study through identifying where inequalities in health and care in later life have been hypothesised to exist among LGBT people based on quantitative and qualitative research literature. A subset of these studies will be selected to review different strategies of identification of LGBT people in survey research and considering the suitability of their application with particular reference to older LGBT people.

IPD meta-analysis protocol

The second research protocol describes individual participant meta-analysis research that will be carried with the purpose of (i) Measuring inequalities in health and care needs between older lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and non-LGBT people in the UK; (ii) Establishing how inequalities vary across the LGBT spectrum; (iii) Understanding the extent to which differences in measurement explain heterogeneity in effect sizes.