Men's sexual and reproductive health in primary care settings: a secondary analysis

Within the United Kingdom, the National Health Service (NHS) offers sexual and reproductive health services in primary care settings. Sexual and reproductive health includes topics such as sexually transmitted infections, infertility, cancers of the reproductive system, and family planning. Anyone can access these services as part of the NHS, but research shows that men generally do not talk to their health care providers about these topics. There has been limited research into why this is the case.
The purpose of the study is to understand: (1) how men’s sexual and reproductive health is written about in UK government documents; and (2) how men talk about primary care settings as a place for receiving sexual and reproductive health care. The study will have two parts. The first part will involve looking at policy documents about men’s sexual and reproductive health from governmental organisations such as the NHS, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), and Public Health England (PHE). We will use an approach called content analysis to examine the documents to understand who the policies are for and what the policies are about. We will also use another method called discourse analysis to consider the assumptions underlying the policies. The second part of the study will involve re-analysing 40-60 existing interviews available to University of Oxford researchers. These existing interviews feature men talking about their experiences with sexual and reproductive health issues. We will look for themes across the interviews to see how men might talk about their actions and decisions, their primary care providers, or other people’s attitudes about these issues.

We will use the findings from the study to write two articles for academic journals and give a presentation at a national conference with other researchers and health care providers. We will also share our findings with the public in a blog post. We plan to use our findings as evidence for writing another research proposal to improve men’s sexual and reproductive health in primary care.

Amount awarded: £28,164