The research paper titled “STDs and Partner Notification: A Review of the Literature and Proposals for Future Research”, written by Laura Hood, focuses on the issues of diseases and specifically partner notification. Partner notification is one of many different tools used by health officials in order to control the increase of sexually transmitted diseases. In the research paper, partner notification was defined as the process by which a sex partner or a needle-sharing partner of a person known to have a sexually transmitted disease is informed of their exposure to the sexually transmitted disease and encouraged to seek medical evaluation (Macke and Maher, 1999). Laura focused on three main partner notification issues that were prevalent among the literature that she reviewed: methods used to notify partners, patient disclosure, and public vs. private healthcare. There are many strategies that deal with the notification of a partner.
Some of these include self-referral, provider referral, or contact referral. Laura’s research shows that provider referral is more effective in the case that more providers are notified and medically evaluated. Another issue of partner notification deals with the role of the physician and how studies show that educational efforts are desired in order to raise physician awareness in the area of required reportable STDs. Other issues that deal directly with the patient deal more with the gender power imbalance, claiming that STDs have a greater and more substantial impact on women’s health than men’s health. Laura also includes different types of prevention by the different public, private, and governmental health sectors. The review of literature found that the public health sector is the sector that needs the most emphasis in the area of partner notification.
From Laura’s possible research section, I feel that her suggestion of a longitudinal study following the change of sexual behavior and safer sex / contraception practices would be effective future research. I think too often than not, college aged students are very na ” ive and unaware of the many sexually transmitted diseases and the consequences that they bear. I think that this study would help give us an idea of just how important it would be to implement educational programs in both high school and college institutions. I think this study would be very important when dealing with preventative methods.
In conclusion, I thought that Laura’s research was very thorough and informational, cited by credible sources. I thought that she presented enlightening information in a clear and concise manner. I enjoyed reading her paper and think she deserves a pretty good grade J.