Children's gender identity services moving to Manchester as long-running clinic shut down

The NHS is closing a major gender identity clinic for children after it was criticised for being ‘not safe’ in an independent review, amid increasing demand. The service will instead be moved to regional centres, being led by the Royal Manchester and Alder Hey Children’s Hospitals.

New centres are having to be set up to replace the clinic which had been provided by Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Regional clinics will be set up to ‘ensure the holistic needs’ of patients are being met after warnings that having only one provider of gender identity services was ‘not a safe or viable long-term option’.

A service in the North West will be led by Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust and the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, with both trusts providing specialist mental health services.

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The Tavistock clinic - called the Gender and Identity Development Service (GIDS) - was launched in 1989. The highly specialised clinic was designed to help young people presenting with difficulties with their gender identity, reads the service’s website.

But in 2021, amid ‘concerns by healthcare professionals and the Children’s Commissioner for England’, the service was given an ‘inadequate’ rating by the Care Quality Commission - the watchdog for health and social care providers. The report reads that the ‘concerns related to clinical practice, safeguarding procedures and assessments of capacity to consent to treatment’.

Doctors have also shared concerns that some patients were referred on to a gender transitioning pathway too quickly, The Guardian has reported.

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