NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue Pride Health Center Honored for Advancing Efforts to Train and Educate LGBTQ+ Healthcare Providers
Organization gave Pride Health Center its Organizational/Institutional Leadership Award The award was presented at the 2024 LGBTQ+ Health Workforce Conference in NYC
May 06, 2024
NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue today announced that Building the Next Generation of Academic Physicians (BNGAP) selected the hospital’s Pride Health Center as the recipient of its Organizational/Institutional Leadership Award. The award recognizes Bellevue’s commitment to advancing efforts to train and educate health care professionals on LGBTQ+ health and healthcare.
The award was presented during the LGBTQ+ Health Workforce 12th Anniversary Conference, held May 2-4, 2024 in New York City.
“Bellevue is honored to be recognized for our commitment to our LGBTQ patients and for training the next generation of culturally-competent providers,” said NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue CEO William Hicks. “Our physicians and health care professionals are leaders in providing high-quality, comprehensive care and addressing the health needs of our LGBTQ+ patients with dignity and respect. Congratulations to our Pride Health Center team on this well-deserved recognition.” “We are overwhelmed to have been selected to receive the Organizational/Institutional Leadership Award at the 2024 LGBTQ+ Health Workforce 12th Anniversary Conference,” said Dr. Robert Pitts, Medical Director of the Pride Health Center at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue. “We’re so honored to receive this award because it recognizes the important work that we are doing here at Bellevue to address equity and to deliver gender affirming health care to all LGBTQ communities in New York City.”
Building the Next Generation of Academic Physicians (BNGAP) works to help diverse medical students and residents become aware of academic medicine as a career option and to provide them with the resources to further explore and potentially embark on an academic medicine career. The theme of this year’s conference was Creating a Roadmap to Empower the LGBTQ+ Health Community.
The Pride Health Center at Bellevue was established in 2018 to address the needs of LGBTQ patients and communities across New York City.
“We developed the Pride Center really to meet the needs of New Yorkers across the city and deliver gender affirming comprehensive care to all New Yorkers regardless of their ability to pay or country of origin,” said Dr. Pitts. “This award exemplifies the outstanding gender affirming care we deliver on a daily basis, and is a testament to our promise to make sure that all New Yorkers—including queer New Yorkers—can live their healthiest lives possible.”
Bellevue’s Pride Health Center is staffed by five primary care providers who see patients every day of the week. The Center has a dedicated psychiatrist, as well as a clinical pharmacist who sees patients for gender affirming hormone therapy, including estrogen and testosterone, as well as long acting HIV prevention. The Center now cares for nearly 400 LGBTQ patients, 20 percent of whom are uninsured, 20 percent of whom speak a primary language other than English, and 80 percent of whom identify as either Black or Latino. In more than five years of care, none of them have become HIV-positive thanks to a suite of innovative and empathetic approaches, including a clinical trial for long-acting injectable pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).
The LGBT Health Workforce Conference is the largest and most well-known national LGBT health workforce conference in the United States held annually in New York City. The conference provides an overview of up-to-date practices (climate, educational, research, and clinical) in preparing the health care workforce to address the health concerns and disparities of LGBT communities. Their mission is to help prepare the health care workforce to address the health concerns of LGBTQ communities, and to provide professional development resources to support these goals.
For more information about the Pride Health Center at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, visit
https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/bellevue/services/pride-health-center/.
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MEDIA CONTACT: Bellevue Public Relations, 212-562-4516
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About NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue
NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue is America’s oldest public hospital, established in 1736. Affiliated with the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the 851-bed hospital is a major referral center for highly complex cases, with 6,000 employees including highly skilled, interdisciplinary clinical staff. The hospital is a Level 1 Trauma Center and annually it sees about 103,000 emergency room visits, more than 520,000 outpatient visits, and almost 200,000 visits to our COVID-19 testing and vaccine centers. Clinical centers of excellence include: Emergency Medicine and Trauma Care; Cardiovascular Services; Bariatric Surgery; Designated Regional Perinatal Center and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit; Children’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program; and Cancer Services. For more information, visit www.nychealthandhospitals.org/bellevue and follow us on Facebook and X(Twitter).
About NYC Health + Hospitals
NYC Health + Hospitals is the largest municipal health care system in the nation serving more than a million New Yorkers annually in more than 70 patient care locations across the city’s five boroughs. A robust network of outpatient, neighborhood-based primary and specialty care centers anchors care coordination with the system’s trauma centers, nursing homes, post-acute care centers, home care agency, and MetroPlus health plan—all supported by 11 essential hospitals. Its diverse workforce of more than 43,000 employees is uniquely focused on empowering New Yorkers, without exception, to live the healthiest life possible. For more information, visit www.nychealthandhospitals.org and stay connected on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.