Women's Health: Adolescent Healthcare

Today, adolescents have a need in healthcare services more than ever before. Simultaneously, they pose a larger number various challenges for healthcare system than adults and children because of their fast evolving physical, emotional, and intellectual development (Berlan & Bravender, 2012). Presently, there is a broad platform of health services adolescents can enjoy: schools, private facilities, mobile clinics, youth pharmacies, and outreach strategies.

The effect of peer and parental relationships, together with culture, shapes most aspects of adolescent development. The link adolescents have with their family, peers and individuals in the social sphere plays a crucial role in the formative periods of their maturing. The peer groups provide their members with the chance to develop their social skills (Hillard, 2013). On the other hand, they may become the foundation of negative influence through peer pressure. Youth culture is socially shared, learned, and influences every aspect of a young individual’s life.

Developing the improved health system for adolescent populace may need the realization of various basic goals. Firstly, it is important to emphasize the capability of primary healthcare services to offer high-quality screenings, health management, care management, and referral arrangements for specialty services. Secondly, there is the necessity of coordinating the behavior, mental health, reproductive, and dental services in the community and practice the settings missing in the western society. Lastly, ensuring confidentiality and consent for adolescent patients seeking care is another aspect missing in the western world.

Adolescents are in a crucial transitional period which involves biological changes and the need to negotiate important developmental activities like increasing normative and independence experimentation. The present-day adolescent populace is becoming more ethnically diverse with the fast increasing number of Asian and Hispanic American youth (Nezu, Nezu, Geller, & Weiner, 2012). Therefore, the emerging ethnic diversity may need cultural responsiveness to the healthcare requirements, sharpened attention to academic outcomes, and disparate health that are correlated with poverty particularly amid adolescents from ethnic groups.

As a physician, one must set and clearly explain the expectations of a clinical encounter to a patient. Conversing with the parent and teenager together allows them to know what services they might expect from the visit. To have a complete picture of the situation it is significant to ensure that the 14year-old will have some private time with the physician as the youth are often reluctant to speak in the presence of their parents (O'Donohue, Benutom, & Tolle, 2013). Then, respectfully disengage the parent so that the physician might conduct a physical check-up and speak with a teen alone. Lastly, reinforce confidentiality before talking with the parent will built more trust from the part of the patient and guarantee more sincere answers in the future.

After establishing trust, the physician can use the 5Ps as a universal rule of taking the patient’s sexual history. The 5Ps are partners, protection from STDs, practices, past STD history, and pregnancy prevention (Phelps & Hassed, 2013). Again, it is necessary to comment on the steps that will be taken. Then, asking questions to establish sex, concurrency, number of partners of the patient, and exploring the categories of sexual activity the patient engages in will not be so confusing. The physician should ask about and stress the importance of using condoms. Asking about the teenager’s history on STD and learning if the patient wants to be pregnant when older will facilitate the discussion about future contraceptives.

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