Teachers and healthcare workers' perceived reproductive health challenges faced by secondary school adolescents in low resource community of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Loading...
Date
2021
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Adolescents’ early sexual debut contributes to the number of sexual and reproductive health
challenges that they are faced with. In trying to deal with these reproductive health challenges
that adolescents are facing South Africa recently adopted the Integrated School Health Policy,
which enables adolescents to access sexual reproductive health care services and information
in the school context. This study explored reproductive health challenges from the perspective
of the life orientation teachers and school health nurses.
Methods:
Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 15 participants in some low resource
communities in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Four of the participants were school
health nurses and 11 of the participants were life orientation teachers.
Results:
The results of this study show that when it comes to reproductive health education teachers
and school health nurses face numerous challenges. At the macro and exo level the Department
of Education provides life orientation teachers with limited teaching resources and the life
orientation curriculum covers the minimum number of reproductive health topics. On the other
hand, the Department of Health does not have enough school health nurses, therefore leaving
the available school health nurses with a load of work that is beyond their capacity.
At the meso level parents find it difficult to communicate with their children about sex-related
topics, this however is influenced by culture, religion, and tradition. Due to poor parent-child
communication, children find themselves subjected to peers as their source of information and
that leaves room for peer pressure or peer influence. At this level of influence families are
confronted with poverty which impacts the behaviour of adolescents getting married at a
young age and also being sexually active at a young age for transactional sex. This exposes
the adolescents to teenage pregnancy, STI’s & STD’s as well as other reproductive health
challenges. At the Micro level adolescents are less informed about reproductive health and by
the onset of their sexual debut they engage themselves in an act that they are less informed about.
Description
Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.