Understanding the Development Needs of the Primary Care and Community Health Workforces With Regard to Sexual Health in NHSScotland to Enable the Successful Implementation of ‘The Sexual Health and Blood Borne Virus Framework 2011-2015’: a Scoping Study

The Sexual Health and Blood Borne Virus Framework (Scottish Government, 2011) was published in July 2011 providing a single overarching strategy to bring together and address four linked policy areas: sexual health and wellbeing, including teenage pregnancy, HIV, Hepatitis C and Hepatitis B.
The need for the delivery of sexual health services to be a multi-agency, multi-disciplinary responsibility is highlighted throughout the Framework, as is the importance of having adequately trained staff in both health and non-health roles. The primary care workforce are often responsible for delivering a large proportion of frontline sexual health services, often by staff who have little specialist education and training in sexual health. Understanding the training and development needs of this workforce is therefore important in ensuring effective delivery of service, and implementing The Sexual Health and Blood Borne Virus Framework.

The main aim of the scoping study was to understand the development needs of the primary care and community health workforces with regard to sexual health in NHS Scotland to enable the successful implementation of ‘The Sexual Health and Blood Borne Virus Framework 2011-2015’. For the purposes of this study, the primary care workforce considered included the following groups: general practitioners, general practice nurses, public health nurses (health visitors and school nurses), community midwives, receptionists and administrative staff, health care assistants and healthcare support workers.