Prevention of Sexual Health Related Problems - Essay Example

?HEALTH SCIENCES AND MEDICINE POLICY Identified Policy HIV, STD and Pregnancy Prevention Education are a School Health Policy that seeks to address issues of sexual health in schools. Some of the core issues the policy seeks to address include issues of HIV, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy. The target setting of the policy is schools and thus the policy could be described to be a youth oriented policy that has its main output achievement as prevention of sexual health related problems rather than the solution of the said problems. In the contemporary world, it would be noticed that the health of the youth population has been something that most governments including the present government has realized as a very important advocacy for national development. This is because the youth forms larger percentage of the population and also act as the future hope for continuing the running of national affairs (State School Database, 2012). Target Group The population of the policy was given a very wide scope and that was teenagers. However, the target group of the policy; and in other words the sample size of the policy were reduced to teenagers in various high schools and middle schools. Because the policy was a State specific program, State Schools were targeted for the implementation of the policy. There were a number of factors considered in selecting State Schools as the site for the study. First, it would be noted that accessibility to people of the population group was very high if State Schools were targeted. With a literacy rate exceeding 89% (Ellis, 2008), it was expected that a lot of teenagers would be captured as part of the policy if State Schools were targeted. Secondly, the school was identified to be a setting that has several stakeholders for making national programs of this nature very efficient and effective. Examples of these stakeholders are parents and teachers, who were all targeted by the policy makers and given special roles to play in ensuring the success of the policy. Enactment of the Policy Reports from the national census database on the increasing rates of sexual health cases such as HIV, STDs and pregnancy among school children; especially the adolescents was the major event that led to the proposal of the HIV, STD and pregnancy prevention education policy (Fredman, 2001). As part of the policy proposal and subsequent enactment of the policy, several efforts were enacted to make the dream a reality. For example, there was a State to State brainstorming exercise to sample as many views from stakeholders as possible. The brainstorming was followed by a draft formation process whereby the general involvement in the process was reduced to a substantial number. The drafting was done by a group of health and legal experts on how to ensure that the enactment of the policy achieved both its target of preventing sexual health related incidences. The involvement of legal experts was necessary because the policy was going to be implemented at a national level and thus it was prudent to ensure that there was no infringement of legal requirements (Waddington & Hendriks, 2002). Public awareness on the policy was initiated after the final whitepaper on the policy was passed into law. Awareness creation involved several schools based campaigns as well as state media publicities that targeted children of school going age. Inclusion Consent As indicated earlier, the policy was enacted through schools because of a purposive agency to have the inclusion of parents and teachers as stakeholders in the promotion of the health and welfare of children. This not withstanding, there was a nationwide sensitization activities to draw the attention of parents to the fact there was going to such policies that would automatically involve their wards in State Schools. In light of this, policy makers did not need specialized permission to be sought from parents in including their wards. Moreover, greater component of the policy is incorporated into the school’s curriculum and so do not require any special roles to be played by children outside the school’s curricula that would raise issues of parental consent. Current state of Policy Presently, the HIV, STD and pregnancy education policy is in place in almost every State of the country. This is generally because the policy has received a National Accent for implementation. The current state of the policy also includes the recording of several instances of successes according to the overall aim of the policy. For example, subsequent figures and data from national census show drastic reduction in cases of sexual health incidences since the time of the nationwide implementation (Ellis, 2008). Much of this success could be assigned to the effects that various stakeholders of the policy have put in place. In all, there are three major stakeholders that can be identified and these are government, society and school children. The government has been effective in providing needed resources and logistics for the implementation of the policy. Society has also come to embrace the policy as a positive one that has the welfare of the children of the nation at heart. Therefore, there has not been much controversies on the policy as other health related polices have witnessed (Aristotle, 2003). Finally, students, who are the target of the policy have greatly adhered to the basic stipulations of the policy and have generally conducted themselves well. Therefore, it could be concluded that the HIV, STD and pregnancy prevention education policy was an appropriate policy that came at the right time to address the right issues. Monitoring and Evaluation Activities An important aspect of the policy has always been the monitoring and evaluation aspect. Enactors of the policy ensured that there was going to be a spiral approach to monitoring and evaluating the program to assess the level of impact that the policy is having among the youth and especially those in schools. A spiral approach to monitoring and evaluation ensures that there will not be a period lapsing before monitoring and evaluation would be undertaken. Rather, monitoring and evaluation of the policy would be an ongoing processing and that there will be offices for monitoring and evaluation specially set up for this policy (State School Database, 2012).). In the first biannual report of the policy, implementers of the policy reported that even though there had been a high level of reduction in cases of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV, not much has been achieved in terms of pregnancy cases because there continues to be high prevalence of teenage pregnancies. It was subsequently identified that the reason why the trend was so was because the approach taken by policy makers was more on health and medical interventions rather than socio-economic. Target group therefore take more precautions that has to do with their health; and thus in terms of STDs and HIV rather than pregnancy because they consider health risks in pregnancy as minimal as compared to STDs and HIV. References Aristotle T., (2003). Ethnica Nichomachea, V.3 1131a – 1131b E. Ross trans. Ellis E, EC (2008). Sex Equality Law, Clarendon Press, Oxford, p. 322. Fredman S., (2001). “Equality: A new generation?”, 30 ILJ, p. 145, at 151-152. State School Database (2012). HIV, STD, and Pregnancy Prevention Education. Retrieved from http://nasbe.org/healthy_schools/hs/bytopics.php?topicid=1140&catExpand=acdnbtm_catA Waddington L & Hendriks A., (2002). “The expanding concept of employment discrimination in Europe: From Direct and indirect discrimination to reasonable accommodation discrimination”, 18/3 IJCLLIR, p. 403 at 406. Read More