Report: Empowering young women: improving sexual health awareness and services

Written by the Healthwatch team

This report highlights the experiences and feedback of young women (aged 16-24) across Wokingham Borough and Reading regarding sexual health education and local sexual health services.

Our Healthwatch Youth team engaged with young women in various settings, such as colleges, universities, and community centres. 165 young women participated in our online survey—135 completed the survey fully, whilst 30 partially completed responses were excluded from the dataset.

The project and report aims to:

Raise awareness of young women’s sexual health and well-being.
Understand the challenges of accessing local sexual health services and identify gaps in information and accessibility.
Improve communication between services and young people.
Increase awareness about available sexual health support.

Our findings revealed three key themes:

1) Sexual health education

“We were only taught about how to remain safe during heterosexual intercourse, in fact when I asked about lesbian sexual health I was removed from the sessions.”

2) Sexual health services

“The only reason I found out about free contraceptive pills is because they was advertising it on Instagram.”

3) Sexual health barriers

“Every time that I go to the GP is a different doctor that I have to talk and it makes it very awkward that I have to explain sexual concerns. It would be better if there was one main GP where I could contact about my concerns."

We have shared the findings and recommendations of this project with key decision-makers to improve local sexual health services and education for young women and young people locally.

We have sent this report to Buckinghamshire, Oxfordhire and Berkshire West Integrated Care Board (BOB ICB), Public Health Reading, Public Health Wokingham Borough and Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust (RBFT) for response.

We will update this report and webpage when we receive responses.