National Sexual Health Services Petition Needing Your Support

A campaign - Save Our Sexual Health Services - was launched today by The British Association for Sexual Health and HIV (BASHH) to The Secretary of State for Health. Sexual health services that are free and open to anyone who needs them have been the keystone of world-leading sexual health care in England for over a hundred years. They provide essential functions such as testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV, free contraception including emergency methods such as the ‘morning after pill’ and long-acting methods, as well as sexual health promotion, advice on STI/HIV prevention and outreach services across the community. These services are free to access, confidential and are there for everyone, including those who are the most vulnerable in society. However, sexual health services, which are no longer funded from the NHS, are facing unprecedented threats as a result of damaging and persistent Government cuts to local authority public health budgets, from which they are now funded. These cuts come at a time when more people are accessing sexual health services than ever before, record levels of STIs are being diagnosed, difficult to treat antibiotic-resistant strains of infection are being detected and the need for quality contraception and HIV testing is more important than ever. Therefore, it is essential that the Government ensures appropriate public health funding is made available for local authorities so we are able to address these challenges head-on and continue to provide the care that people rely on. BASHH is acutely concerned that the persistent Government cuts that have been delivered to local authority public health budgets in recent years are having a real and increasingly visible impact on the quality of care and level of access that sexual health services are able to provide to patients. Now is the time to run a public petition to highlight that failure to provide sufficient funding will critically jeopardise the sexual health of individuals and society as a whole. What is the petition calling for? BASHH and a number of supporting professional and third sector organisations are using the petition to call upon the Government to reverse the damaging cuts that have been made to the public health budget and more broadly, to help raise awareness of the pressures that sexual health services in their widest sense are facing. Please support this petition. BHU has seen its services reduced and we continue to fight to have BHU restored fully so everyone can be seen safely, confidentially and easily. Thank you.