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Learning Objective 1: identify the barriers that nurses face while assessing sexual health and taking sexual history from clients.
Learning Objective 2: recognize the facilitators in sexual history taking.
Sexual health is an area of global concern. Talking about sexual issues is considered aberrant and immoral and sexuality is viewed as a taboo. These perceptions and reservations make the nurses and health professionals uncomfortable in talking about sexual issues.
Purpose
To identify the barriers and facilitators for nurses in taking sexual history from the clients in clinical settings.
Method
Systemic review of 12 articles; quantitative and qualitative, published in international journals in the past 8 years was done to assess the recent global perspective on sexual history taking.
Results
The potential barriers that inhibit the health professionals to assess sexual history are self-embarrassment, fear of embarrassing the client, inadequate training, lack of experience, time constraints, and belief that sexual history is not relevant. Further, open access to patients' files in hospitals jeopardizes the confidentiality of the clients and proves impedimental in sexual history taking. Lack of referrals is another obstacle in assessing sexual history. Age and gender of the clients also impinge on sexual history-taking as people are more comfortable talking about these issues with people of the same gender. There is also a fear of misjudgment while assessing clients of opposite gender. Besides, nurses often skip sexual history in older clients assuming that old people are nonsexual.
In contrast, the facilitators of sexual history taking include proper training, incorporation of sexual assessments in curricula, communication training courses, good-nurse-patient relationship, privacy, and systematic sexual history frameworks.
Conclusion
Sexuality is commonly ignored while carrying out nursing assessments which impedes in providing holistic care. Therefore, what is required is the change in our views about sexuality. Overcoming the barriers and working on the facilitators mentioned above nurses can effectively assess the sexual concerns.
Limitations
Selection bias, as studies giving nurses' view about sexual history taking are limited.
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