Providers should focus on improving the quality of care in existing clinics, particularly in the areas of access, privacy, and confidentiality, and on developing adolescent-friendly clinics focusing on male services. Adolescents should be encouraged to visit clinics prior to an acute need for services. There also is a need for providers who are comfortable with and able to communicate with male adolescents.
In this study, path analysis was used to test a model of the relationships among condom use knowledge, self-efficacy for condom use, coping, and condom use in a sample of 100 urban women. In the final model, the paths between condom use knowledge and self-efficacy, between self-efficacy and condom use, and between self-efficacy and problem-focused coping were significant. In addition, condom use knowledge was indirectly related to condom use through self-efficacy. The final model accounted for 43% of the variance in condom use. Although the women engaged in risky behaviors including having multiple partners, high-risk sexual partners, and unprotected intercourse, they did not worry about or perceive themselves at risk for HIV. To assist women to decrease their risk for sexually transmitted HIV infection, clinicians should conduct individualized assessments of each client's sexual behaviors to identify women at risk. Individualized interventions are recommended to increase both knowledge of how to use condoms and self-efficacy for condom use among women at risk for HIV.
Daily physical activity has the potential to improve health and well-being, yet worldwide surveillance of physical activity levels indicate a growing number of children and adolescents do not meet current physical activity recommendations. The current symptom-reactive paradigm should be reconsidered, and preventive actions initiated, before inactive children become resistant to targeted interventions and require pharmacotherapy, and expensive medical procedures for treatment of preventable illnesses. A cascade of adverse events are associated with a sedentary lifestyle. Nurses are uniquely qualified to identify youth with exercise deficits and encourage daily participation in a variety of age-related physical activities that enhance both health- and skill-related components of physical fitness.Physical activity guidelines should support evidence-based activity recommendations by nurses working with children. New insights regarding the importance of improving muscular strength and motor skill performance early in life are valuable to nurses in formulating exercise recommendations for school-age youth. Specific education in pediatric exercise science provides the foundation for prescribing age-related exercise interventions consistent with the needs, abilities, and interests of infants, toddlers, children, and adolescents. Given the critical importance of primary prevention, transformational change in the current system for identifying and treating youth with exercise deficits is warranted.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.