THT: Political will and funding needed

Political will, greater funding and compulsory sex education are needed to bring down rising rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), the Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) has told inthenews.co.uk.

In response to the latest STI figures from the Health Protection Agency (HPA) the sexual health charity said they show that young people are "not getting the education and services they need to manage their health and relationships".

Lisa Power, THT head of policy, said health campaigners "know what a lot of what the answers are [to reduce STIs] - it's about the political will to do them".

As well as political parties driving improvements in sexual health, THT wants to see compulsory sex education across the school system that goes beyond biology.

"At the moment all it's compulsory for young people to learn is the biology of reproduction and the biology of HIV and frankly being able to do a sketch of the fallopian tubes and the ovaries doesn't teach you how to say 'no' when your boyfriend is telling you 'everyone is doing it'," Ms Power said.

"We believe that teaching needs to take place in schools because school is also where a significant amount of misinformation is - for example in the playground at school break - and that needs to be countered.

"We would love it if everybody had a set of parents who were utterly cool about sex but we know that's not the reality and a lot of parents are grateful if schools will do it and then hopefully people will be able to come back and ask more questions at home."

Rather than medical professionals coming into schools to teach children about sexual health, THT wants to see more young people with sexual health knowledge talking to teenagers.

"That's why THT runs something called Young Leaders Project where we actually take young people who want to do work on this issue and we train them in things like health promotion techniques, public health issues, communication strategies," Ms Power explained.

"They then form local committees and commission work locally from other young people to go into schools and colleges. So it's actually young people providing their own sex education and that's so much more effective."

Ms Power added that she would like to see a general population campaign about sexual health, but only if it is not "at the expense of specialised work that's being done with communities most at risk".

THT also wants sexual health to become a higher priority in primary care trusts, saying fixing problems is "easily doable".

"We know that if you test and treat in a timely fashion; if you do screening programmes for young people; all of those things actually do reduce it," Ms Power said."