Oral papers
Communicating on Sexual Health: Are Medical Students Comfortable to Address the Topic?
L. Lopes
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Portuguese Medical Students Association (anem/pormsic), Braga, Portugal
B. Andrade
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Portuguese Medical Students Association (anem/pormsic), Braga, Portugal
D. Costa
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Portuguese Medical Students Association (anem/pormsic), Braga, Portugal
G. Castro
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Portuguese Medical Students Association (anem/pormsic), Braga, Portugal
R. Dias
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Portuguese Medical Students Association (anem/pormsic), Braga, Portugal
M. I. Matos
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Portuguese Medical Students Association (anem/pormsic), Braga, Portugal
T. Valido
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Portuguese Medical Students Association (anem/pormsic), Braga, Portugal
M. Couto
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Portuguese Medical Students Association (anem/pormsic), Braga, Portugal
M. Esteves
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Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
https://doi.org/10.21465/2016-KP-OP-0002
Fulltext (english, pages 9-9).pdf
Abstracts
Objective: The lack of comfort from physicians is a major reason for sexual
health to be poorly addressed in medical consultations. With this study we aimed to
explore if medical students, future physicians, already feel uncomfortable to address
sexual health when interacting with patients.
Design and Method: All students enrolled in Portuguese medical schools were
invited to participate in an anonymous online questionnaire between March and
June 2015. Students were asked to rate their comfort using a 5-point Likert scale
from 1 (“Completely uncomfortable”) to 5 (“Completely comfortable”). Descriptive
statistics, factor analysis, Chi-square comparisons and multivariable logistic
regression were used to analyze responses.
Results: 1872 responses were analyzed. Medical students are less comfortable
to talk with patients about Sexual Practices and Relationships (mean=2,96)
than Reproduction and Sexual Infections (mean=4,37). Interestingly, the comfort
to address both topics tend to decrease along the medical courses (r=-0,161 and r=-
0,083, respectively, p<0.01), in contrast with the increasing comfort to talk about
sex outside the clinical context (r=0,100 p<0.01). Students’ main justifications for
not feeling comfortable were the fear of letting the patient uncomfortable (29,7%)
or offending them (22,6%).
Conclusions: The lack of comfort to talk about sexual health issues is a reality
when students start to talk to patients, so early tackling of this discomfort is important
to improve medical communication in sexual health. In fact, comfort decrease
can reveal the transition from expectations to the reality experienced during clinical
rotations over the last years of medical education.