A recent study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, suggests that doctors fail to provide important information about sexual health to sexually active teens on a regular basis, which could be leading to them making the wrong choices with regards to safe sex practices. The report states that doctors refrain from providing this vital information despite the fact that one in five sexually active teenage boys isn’t given information about condoms and birth control, by doctors, parents or teachers. This could be having a detrimental effect on the rising levels of teenage pregnancies in the UK. Laura Duberstein Lindberg, from the Guttmacher Institute in New York, states that previous studies have shown that well-informed sexually active teens have safer sex and show better health conditions than those who have no education on safe sex practices – it’s for this reason that parents and teachers, in addition to health professionals, need to be taking an active role in educating teens about sex.
The study involved data from 2006 to 2010 National Survey of Family Growth, where researchers evaluated responses from nearly 1,900 sexually active children aged between 13 and 19 years. All of the participants were asked a series of questions about whether they’d received information about sexual health, including birth control and STIs, from parents, teachers or their local health provider. 55 percent of females and 43 percent of males said that their parents and teachers had discussed birth control with them, and 59 and 66 percent of females and males respectively said that they could cite these sourced for information regarding STI and HIV information. However, only one-third of all participants said the same of their health care providers.
Because health care providers have less time with teens, they have a limited portion of time in which to discuss the various options and risks. However, national guidelines call for them to offer contraceptive information and counselling to all sexually active teens as a routine procedure – this study has found that these processes aren’t taking place. As with parents and teachers, some physicians aren’t always comfortable discussing these topics with teenagers, but the alternative is that teens are left at risk of unplanned pregnancies and infections.
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