The young men’s clinic: addressing men’s reproductive health and responsibilities
Categories: Men's HealthInterest in men’s health, including their sexual and reproductive health, has been growing over the past two decades. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing both recognized the effect of men’s behavior on women’s health, highlighted the importance of shared responsibility and sparked interest in developing interventions to increase mate involvement in reproductive health programs. (1) A 2002 report by The Alan Guttmacher Institute emphasized that the sexual and reproductive health concerns of men are important in their own right, not only because males play important roles as fathers and sexual partners. (2) The National Survey of Adolescent Males, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, and studies and reports sponsored or produced by other organizations have significantly contributed to the growing body of knowledge about men’s sexual and reproductive health concerns, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. (3)
Since 1997, the Office of Family Planning in the Office of Population Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services has funded diverse community-based programs to learn how to engage with and provide reproductive health services to males. (4) This special report describes sexual and reproductive health services and how they have evolved at one of those programs-the Young Men’s Clinic, an ambulatory clinic for adolescent and young adult males in New York City.
THE YOUNG MEN’S CLINIC
The clinic is a component of a reproductive health program jointly operated by the Center for Community Health and Education at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. It is located in the upper Manhattan community of Washington Heights, which has the highest concentration of Hispanic residents in New York City. (5) Created in 1987, the Young Men’s Clinic is the only facility in the city specifically tailored to address the sexual and reproductive health needs of adolescent and young adult men, and has been recognized for many years as an important model of the delivery of community-based health care services to young males.