How Does a Focus on Sexuality Meet Clients’ Needs?

Ultimately, a focus on sexuality helps clients develop a better understanding of their sexuality and the context and motivations of their sexual relationships— important steps in achieving sexual and reproductive health.

This means providers will be better prepared to:

• Help clients make realistic and achievable health decisions
• Help them negotiate safer sex behaviors and prevent infection and unwanted pregnancy
• Help them make contraceptive choices that meet their personal and sexual needs
• Help them address sexual concerns and initiate preventive health behaviors
• Help increase their sexual and reproductive health knowledge and promote sharing of that information
• Help them understand changes in their bodies throughout their life cycle
• Enhance their satisfaction with contraceptive choices, thus contributing to contraceptive continuation
• Improve their satisfaction with services

How Does a Focus on Sexuality Improve Health Services?

Without a focus on sexuality and gender in service delivery, clients may receive inadequate or inappropriate information, and consequently may be unable to protect themselves from disease and unintended pregnancy. Assumptions and misunderstanding about clients’ sexual practices can result in misdiagnoses, which can lead to infections that ultimately threaten the health of the community at large to go untreated.

A sexuality focus means that services are better able to:

• Foster comfort and trust between clients and providers
• Explore underlying issues that affect clients’ needs
• Allow providers to help clients make informed choices
• Improve both client and provider satisfaction
• Attract new clients
• Keep the community knowledgeable and support the community’s role in influencing sexuality and gender dynamics for achieving and maintaining healthy sexual and reproductive behaviors

You may now wish to begin the next module, Understanding Sexuality, or return to the course home page to begin a different module.

© 2007 EngenderHealth