- February 11, 2019
- Jennifer Salerno
Valentine’s Day is nearly here and that means love is in the air. For many teens, that may mean more than just candy adorned cards.
Fast fact: 30% of 12-14-year-olds have had sex with 4 or more people—that number climbs to 48% for 15-17-year-olds and 59% for 18 and over.
Sexual health has always been a hot topic—pun intended—but it’s not the easiest to talk about. Whether it’s parents feeling just as embarrassed as their son or daughter about “the talk” or professionals trying to elicit honesty from youth who aren’t open to sharing. Barriers to having these much needed conversations are common. And even when you do get youth to share, many of us feel overwhelmed when talking with them about the risks they have identified. Adolescent Counseling Technology (ACT) for Sexual Health can help! ACT-SH functions as a virtual health educator providing interactive and engaging, evidence-based counseling to guide youth in identifying sexual health risks and creating personalized safer sex action plans. ACT-SH can be a powerful tool to help understand the needs of our youth:
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Like RAAPS with Adolescent Counseling Technology (ACT), youth respond to a set of questions that identify risk behaviors, in this case specifically on sexual health, but ACT goes one step further by providing motivational interviewing based feedback to youth as they are completing the assessment. And when used in tandem with RAAPS, ACT-SH is automatically launched when youth respond positively to the sexual activity question, creating no extra step in workflow!
Here’s what a current user of RAAPS and ACT SH had to say: “I am a big proponent of RAAPS! The patients generally are honest and able to complete RAAPS quickly. We initiated ACT-SH a couple of years ago and having RAAPS automatically direct sexually active patients to ACT-SH has worked SO well. Although most of my patients are pretty open with me, I do feel ACT-SH has helped the more timid ones share behaviors they otherwise would not. The benefit? I then can better address, counsel, do necessary testing, etc. Thank you!”
For more information on the implementation of ACT SH in a community based setting, check out this case study from Spartanburg, South Carolina.