Interactive tool for sexual health commissioning released

Public Health England (PHE) has released a tool to improve sexual health commissioning. 

The Sexual Health and Reproductive Health Profiles are an interactive tool providing maps, charts and tables on reproductive health across a range of areas, including: 

 – Teenage pregnancy. 

 – Abortions. 

 – Contraception. 

 – HIV. 

 – Sexually transmitted infections.

 – Sexual offenses. 

The tool also includes wider influences on sexual health and teenage conception, such as alcohol use, education and deprivation. 

Information can be compared with the English average or by PHE centre, region, type of area or deprivation level. 

Users are able to view all indicator trends for their local authority or all local authorities, or for a single indicator. The information can be downloaded to an Excel file. 

A Public Health England statement said: “Early signs indicate that the tool is already proving useful to local sexual health facilitators who have used it in workshops to look at overview figures and wider indicators for teenage conception. Local sexual health and teenage pregnancy leads are using the Profiles alongside other information resources to evaluate teenage pregnancy initiatives in their areas. 

“Local authority sexual health commissioners have been alerted by the tool to the surprising extent of pelvic inflammatory disease admissions in their area, while local authority public health analysts are using the underlying data to generate local reports.”

The tool is available from the Sexual and Reproductive Health Profiles webpages. 

The tool replaces three tools that pre-dated the formation of PHE: Sexual Health Balanced Scorecard; Sexual Health Profiles; and Teenage Pregnancy Profiles.