Sexual health funds being diverted
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Sexual health clinics are suffering because money they have been allocated is being diverted elsewhere, campaigners said on Thursday.
Two thirds of primary care trusts diverted money intended for sexual health care to other services or to reducing debt over the last year, said a survey by HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust and other groups.
“Last year should have been the best year for a long time for sexual health services,” said Terrence Higgins Head of Policy Lisa Power. “Money should have been used to update services, modernise them, improve the way they are provided,” she told BBC radio.
“But many doctors are telling us that that money never reached them—it was turned away before it got anywhere near sexual health services. In the long term that is storing up much more expensive problems for the health service.”
In 2004, the government allocated 300 million pounds over three years to improve sexual health services in England to combat a rise in sexually transmitted diseases. That included 50 million pounds for sexual health campaigns for under-25s.
But only around 3 or 4 million pounds of that fund had been spent on advertising, Conservative health spokesman Tim Loughton told Sky News.
He said the government was not making public health a priority.
“This is why we have an epidemic of sexual diseases, and an epidemic of obesity, drugs and alcohol problems. It is a false economy not to be doing something about it now,” Loughton said.
Health Minister Ivan Lewis said the NHS had made sexual health one of its top priorities but it was ultimately up to local health authorities to decide where to spend money.
“We make the resources available, then we put in place objectives and priorities, and we ask at a local level primary care trusts to make decisions about the need of their local populations,” Lewis told Sky News.
“In doing so, they have got to make balanced judgments.”
The NHS has sent “national support teams” to the 10 to 20 percent of primary care trusts it believes are struggling to meet targets on the delivery of sexual health care, a health department spokeswoman said.
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