Sexual Health Training and Primary Care Providers: A New Frontier for an Old Audience

Background: Primary care providers (PCPs) provide sexual health care for high risk populations, including adolescents. With US Health Care Reform, an increase in health insurance enrollment is expected, with more people accessing primary care.  Thus, PCPs should be a priority audience for sexual health training.  Lack of existing health department (HD) relationships with PCPs; HD inexperience with PCP office operations; PCPs’ established sources for medical education and clinical guidelines; and PCPs competing clinical and educational priorities all serve as challenges to HDs and PCPs developing new partnerships for educational initiatives.  

Methods: The New York City (NYC) STD/HIV Prevention Training Center (PTC) is a CDC-funded regional training center that addresses clinical providers’ STD/HIV educational needs.  To expand the NYC PTC’s training audience reach to New York State (NYS) PCPs caring for adolescents, the PTC identified a NYS pediatrician “champion” to forge partnerships with the NYS American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) chapter and Physicians for Reproductive Health (Physicians).  The AAP NYS chapter and the NYC PTC collaboratively developed an adolescent sexual health webinar series, with five webinars on topics such as creating an adolescent medical home, STD Guidelines, working with LGBTQ-youth and contraception.  AAP developed the content and provided pediatrician speakers while NYC PTC supported content development, coordinated registration, and provided CME and CNE credits. Physicians hosted the webinar and documented participation. All organizations advertised webinars.

Results: For the 5 live webinars occurring between 11/2/2012 to 4/5/2013, 1,454 registered and 570 (39%) participated. Among the live webinar participants, 196 (34%) self-identified from NYS and 247 (43%) from other states. As of 10/1/13, 423 viewed archived sessions; 136 (32%) self-identified from NYS and 142 (34%) from other states.

Conclusions: Working with a national professional medical organization state chapter is an efficient and effective strategy to reach PCPs for sexual health training and has applications for other locales.