UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Understanding sexual healthcare seeking behaviour: why a broader research perspective is needed.

Mapp, F; Wellings, K; Hickson, F; Mercer, CH; (2017) Understanding sexual healthcare seeking behaviour: why a broader research perspective is needed. BMC Health Serv Res , 17 (1) , Article 462. 10.1186/s12913-017-2420-z. Green open access

[thumbnail of s12913-017-2420-z.pdf]
Preview
Text
s12913-017-2420-z.pdf - Published Version

Download (461kB) | Preview

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Despite effective and accessible treatments, many sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in high-income countries go untreated, causing poor sexual health for individuals and their partners. Research into STI care has tended to focus on biomedical aspects of infections using patient samples and prioritised attendance at healthcare services. This approach overlooks the broader social context of STIs and healthcare-seeking behaviours, which are important to better understand the issue of untreated infections. MAIN BODY: This paper is structured around three main arguments to improve understanding of help-seeking behaviour for STIs in order to help reduce the burden of untreated STIs for both individuals and public health. Firstly, biomedical perspectives must be combined with sociological approaches to align individual priorities with clinical insights. More research attention on understanding the subjective experiences of STI symptoms and links to healthcare-seeking behaviour is also needed. Secondly, a focus on non-attendance at healthcare services is required to address the patient-centric focus of STI research and to understand the reasons why individuals do not seek care. Finally, research using non-patient samples recruited from outside medical contexts is vital to accurately reflect the range of behaviours, beliefs and health issues within the population to ensure appropriate and effective service provision. We suggest piggy-backing other research on to existing studies as an effective way to recruit participants not defined by their patient status, and use a study recruiting a purposive non-patient sample from an existing dataset - Britain's third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3) as an illustrative example. CONCLUSION: STIs are common but treatable, however a range of social and cultural factors prevent access to healthcare services and contribute to the burden of untreated infection. Different conceptual and empirical approaches are needed to better understand care-seeking behaviour and reduce the gap between social and biomedical advancements in managing untreated infection.

Type: Article
Title: Understanding sexual healthcare seeking behaviour: why a broader research perspective is needed.
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1186/s12913-017-2420-z
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-017-2420-z
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Keywords: Irving Zola, Natsal-3, Non-attendance, Non-patient samples, Sexual health clinics, Sexually transmitted infections
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute for Global Health
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute for Global Health > Infection and Population Health
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1563785
Downloads since deposit
77Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item