Social Determinants and Sexual Health in Adolescents

After discovering a noticeable need for sexual health education and disease prevention for adolescents in the Promise Community Health Center community, we as a group set to work on researching how to address and combat this need. Ten articles pertaining to this issue highlighted four main factors in adolescent sexual health: practices and barriers to adolescents seeking information about sexual health, how they can most effectively learn about sexual health, parental influence on adolescent sexuality, and the healthcare provider’s effect on an adolescent’s sexual health visit. With these findings the project was able to identify interventions that Promise Community Health may be able to utilize, which include involvement of Promise healthcare workers in the school setting, modification of Promise’s website, and adapting the way that well-child visits are carried out. Since these interventions revolve heavily around prevention, Jean Watson’s Theory of Transpersonal Caring was utilized to guide these prevention efforts and to care holistically for the adolescents around Promise