VANCOUVER, B.C. - Nurses at a youth clinic in Vancouver say there's a troubling imbalance in just who is walking through their doors to seek sexual-health information and treatment: almost all of them are female.
In fact, only six per cent of the clientele at the Evergreen Youth Clinic are boys or young men, a statistic that prompted the facility's nurses to team up with researchers at the University of British Columbia to find out what's keeping male patients away and what can be done to bring them in.
They found it appeared to be a mix of education and cultural stereotypes.
The study's authors hope the findings help health providers reach young males and how to better treat and educate them when it comes to sexual health and sexually transmitted diseases.
"In the 24 years that we (the Evergreen clinic) have been offering free sexual-health services, we have barely ever seen men," says Paramita Banerjee, a public health nurse at the clinic who worked on the study.
"And we know that the women are not having sex by themselves."
The study used a combination of focus groups and surveys to gauge why young men - defined as aged 14 to 25 - don't seek out the sexual-health services at the clinic.
On one hand, there were gaps in what the men in the study knew about sexually transmitted diseases, how to prevent them and how to get tested. The participants complained about problems with their sex education in school.
But even more difficult to address, says Banerjee, are the cultural barriers that cause boys and young men to shy away from seeing a doctor about sexual problems or to seek advice on how to prevent them in the first place.
"As a society, we've been mostly focusing on the young women, and unfortunately what we've done is added to the myth that sexual health is only a woman's responsibility," she says.
"They guys told us, really straight forward, that it's not really their responsibility."
The study offers several recommendations, many focusing on outreach and building positive relationships with the men that do show up, which the researchers say will make them more likely to return.
But Banerjee says the most effective change would be to open more health clinics aimed at youth that offer broad primary care services, rather than the Evergreen clinic, which puts a heavy focus on sexual health.
She says young men are much more likely to visit a clinic with a more general focus, because it lets them avoid the stigma they might feel visiting a sexual health clinic and allows them to build an ongoing relationship with a specific doctor or facility.
Vancouver already has one such clinic, which the study notes has a male clientele of 25 per cent - still less than its female patients, but four times higher than the proportion of young men who visit Evergreen.
The researchers also toyed with staging guys-only nights at the clinic, holding four of them last year. The young men who went to the clinic on those nights liked the concept, but some questioned whether it would be a good idea to have them on a regular basis.
The study's authors plan to share their findings to the community and health officials, beginning with an event in Vancouver on Wednesday evening.
"We're going to present the findings to some key stakeholders within the Vancouver Coastal (Health) management team, so we're hoping that we might start looking at some policy change," says Banerjee.
"We are trying to get (other health regions) to look at this study, and we really want them to do their own studies and see if they found the same thing we did."
?? The Canadian Press, 2010