Most adults are sexually active, being an integral part of an individual’s well-being and quality of life. Ensuring people practice safe sex and maintain good sexual health, is one of the key challenges to the NHS.

Top line figures for sexual health appear positive with levels of STIs and teenage pregnancies falling, but the detail masks concerning trends within certain groups showing poor outcomes within underlying issues and inequalities.¹

The impact of poor sexual health can have significant impacts on the individuals, local communities and the NHS:

• The UK has the highest teenage birth and abortion rate in Western Europe²
• In 2006 the cost to the NHS of induced abortions was > £48million
• In England in 2018 new diagnoses of STI’s increased by 5% to 447k³

Providing convenient access to appropriate information and professional advice, is essential to help people make the appropriate decisions to improve their sexual health.

The NICE ‘Impact Sexual Health’ document published February 2019 ⁴ ,recognised the following 3 areas as being important to support the improvement of sexual health:

1. Contraception
2. STIs
3. HIV

In this module we will focus on these 3 areas to help community pharmacy to take a more active role to promote positive sexual health within their local community