The latest Sexual Health Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) for Surrey highlights a need to improve engagement and understanding of sexual health & contraception needs in younger people. Against this backdrop and in discussion with Public Health, Healthwatch Surrey (who has been part of the Surrey Sexual Health Outreach Group since 2019) wanted to amplify the voice of under 25s in relation to sexual health services in Surrey.
We engaged with 9 colleges through in person visits and an online survey (the 2 colleges we went to in person both have sexual health outreach sessions within the college).
In total, 594 people responded.
Read our key findings in our report, highlighting that 75% of students were aware of sexual health services although this was affected by whether the college they attended ran sexual health outreach sessions.
Although we spoke to students who said “Sexual health advice is very useful and helpful and it’s easy to talk to someone if advice is needed.”, the main reason students don’t consider going to face to face sexual health clinics was embarrassment “I wouldn’t be able to go face to face to talk about any issue I’m having sexually out of anxiety and embarrassment.”
Our feedback and themes have been responded to by Surrey County Council’s Public Health team, including some helpful information to help people get the most from sexual health services in Surrey. These have been added to the report.
| Sexual Health services for under 25s - July 2025 (pdf) | Download File (pdf 178.24 KB) |
| Sexual Health services for under 25s - July 2025 (word) | Download File (vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document 103.80 KB) |
