Project description
From exclusion to equity in Irish healthcare
Despite healthcare being a human right, transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) people in Ireland face significant barriers, including stigma and long waitlists. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the TransHealth project will investigate how Ireland’s health system includes or excludes TGD individuals. By combining surveys and interviews with TGD people across five cities and analysing government policies, the project aims to identify specific obstacles to care. Working directly with TGD organisations and policymakers, the project will co-produce practical recommendations to improve services. Ultimately, the project’s goal is to reduce unmet health needs and provide actionable policy tools to ensure Ireland’s healthcare system is truly universal, inclusive and aligned with international equality standards.
Objective
This fellowship investigates how Ireland’s Universal Health Coverage (UHC) system includes—or excludes—transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) people, and identifies policy levers for change. Despite UHC being a recognised health right, TGD populations remain disproportionately excluded due to stigma, fragmented services, and intersecting vulnerabilities. In Ireland, gender-affirming care is centralised, waitlists are long, and commitments under UHC remain misaligned with lived realities.
The study applies a mixed-methods, intersectional case study across five hubs (Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Waterford). SO1 foregrounds TGD experiences through 30 semi-structured interviews and a descriptive online survey (n 75). SO2 uses Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis (IBPA) of Sláintecare/HSE/EU instruments (2017–2025) and ~10 policymaker interviews, triangulating with SO1 to map barriers and enablers. SO3 convenes a participatory workshop with TGD organisations, providers, policymakers, and academics to co-produce feasible recommendations.
Expected outputs include a UHC-aligned gap analysis, joint displays linking lived experience to policy, a validated Policy Recommendations Guideline, two open-access articles, a policy brief, a closing roundtable, and public-facing outputs (webpage, briefs, webinars, media). Impact spans science (transferable UHC/TGD methods), policy (Sláintecare-ready levers), society (reduced unmet need), and economy (resource optimisation).
Hosted at UCD’s School of Nursing, Midwifery & Health Systems under Dr John Gilmore, the fellowship combines methodological rigour, Open Science, GDPR-compliant data management, and co-production. It contributes to the EU LGBTIQ Equality Strategy, the European Pillar of Social Rights, and SDG 3.8 while equipping the researcher with Horizon Europe–ready skills and strengthening career prospects across academia, health systems, and policy.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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4 Dublin
Ireland
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