Thursday 13 May 2010

Treading water.

Our perinatal meeting this morning revealed that last month just over 10% of deliveries were to mothers under 18. This is fairly standard for here but pretty shocking compared to the UK. And in addition to all the added complications that young mothers face, in view of our 30% HIV rate in pregnant women, a sad inditement on HIV education in young people.

The meeting then turned to a discussion on ways to decrease this. There was quite a lot of support for encouraging abstinence amongst young people, something that I personally think is an unrealistic solution.
We also discussed increasing access to healthcare (and therefore contraception) in an open and non-judgemental way. One of the problems of the whole local community recieving healthcare at a clinic is that the teenagers face a lack of confidentiality and the judgement that goes along with that. I am keen that we recognise that teenagers are having sex and tackle the unprotected nature of it. We need to increase our school-based health education programmes but we are hampered in this by an education minister who is set against the provision of condoms in school.

Sometimes I just feel so frustrated that we seem to only be managing problems here rather than looking for solutions to these problems.

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