To promote responsible and healthy sexuality in all stages of life through Primary Health Care (PHC), the Doctor Faustino Pérez Hernández University of Medical Sciences, in the province of Sancti Spíritus, hosts the Master’s Degree in Community Clinical Sexology, the first of its type approved in Cuba.
Doctors, psychologists, nurses and Communication professionals make up the enrollment of this unique opportunity for improvement, because according to Noemí Coello Pérez, coordinator of the master’s degree, although another was later opened at the National Center for Sexual Education (Cenesex), it is focused more on comprehensive sexuality education.
He explained that the fundamental objective of this option in Sancti Spíritus is to provide specialists with the necessary tools and knowledge so that they can work with sexual ailments, problems, difficulties and dysfunctions from the PHC areas themselves.
The identification of these problems in clinics or polyclinics is still limited, more emphasis is placed on non-communicable chronic diseases and other pathologies, stressed the expert who reiterated that at a global level it has taken a lot of effort to incorporate these issues into health. comprehensive of patients.
According to the United Nations Organization and the consensus reached by scholars on the subject, the concept of sexual health is linked NOT only to the absence of diseases, but also to biological, psychological and social well-being.
Félix Rafael Wert Tellez, member of the Academic Committee of the master’s degree, assured that it includes 13 courses and in the case of the first block, for example, clinical and educational sexology, the National Sexual Education Program and the methodologies that They are used in so-called Popular Education.
He added that sexual rights and psychosexual characteristics from childhood to adulthood are also addressed, especially in this last stage given the existence of the most dissimilar myths, the diverse families that exist in society and violence and sexual abuse.
He stated that all these studies are in line with the community intervention methodology approved, in turn, by Cenesex, the essential rector of the program that extends to the rest of the Cuban provinces through multidisciplinary chairs of sexology and comprehensive sexuality education.
In the case of Sancti Spíritus, these chairs are present in the universities of Medical Sciences and José Martí Pérez.
Noemí Coello Pérez said that they also have planned a course on sexual and reproductive health in adolescence where pregnancy, abortion and early relationships are addressed, since they are problems that are seen every day in this central territory, a place with fertility rates in this age group above that of other age ranges.
He said that, as has been analyzed and warned by specialists, teenage mothers contribute to low birth weight, a prioritized indicator in the province; hence the insistence on addressing these issues.
