SCORA Programs partners. This year, enrolled activities have all worked hard on improving maternal health whether they have educated almost 3000 high school students in reproductive health in Pakistan, or educated around 1500 medical students from Indonesia in maternal health care. Following IFMSA’s key collaboration with Ipas, activities on access to safe abortion are central for the program. Furthermore, this program covers topics regarding for example family planning, obstetric violence, humanized birth, breastfeeding, and postpartum sequelae. Sufficient maternal healthcare services are achieved by providing antenatal care during pregnancy, skilled care during childbirth, and care after childbirth. Therefore, we also need medical students and other healthcare providers all over the world to work for overcoming some of the main barriers to inadequate access to maternal healthcare as poverty, cultural and religious understanding, lack of information, and untrained healthcare professionals. As there are currently no activities enrolled in the program, it is important that you make sure to enroll all ongoing and future activities in the area of maternal health. The current picture is not reflecting the real situation in SCORA, so let us all work together and ensure that our true impact on maternal health and access to safe abortion can be measured.
Comprehensive Sexuality Education cse@ifmsa.org Comprehensive sexuality education covers the wide array of topics that affect sexuality and sexual health. It is grounded in evidence-based, peer-reviewed science. Its goal is to promote health and well-being in a way that is developmentally appropriate. It includes information and communication skills building as well as values exploration. Ideally, sex education in school is an integrated process that builds upon itself year after year, is initiated in kindergarten, and is provided throughout the entire education system, meaning until the last grade of high school. The SCORA Manual
The goals of comprehensive sexuality education are to help young people gain a positive view of sexuality and to provide them with developmentally appropriate knowledge and skills so that they can make healthy decisions about their sex lives now and in the future. Medically accurate sex education is an investment in our children’s future — their well-being. Our “return on investment” could be a generation of young people who have heard more helpful messages about sexuality than the provocative media images and/or silences they currently witness. It could be a generation of women and men comfortable in their own skin; able to make well- informed, responsible decisions; form healthy relationships; and take care of their bodies.
HIV/AIDS & Other STIs hivaids@ifmsa.org There are more than 1 million sexually transmitted infections (STIs) acquired every day worldwide. This means that each year, there are an estimated 357 million new infections. This program was born from the need to tackle issues related to HIV/AIDS and other STI’s which have proven to be a major public health concern. Human rights are inextricably linked with the spread and impact of these infections on individuals and communities around the world. The ultimate goal of activities under this program consists, in a general level, of improving healthcare attention to those living with HIV/AIDS or with any other STI and reducing stigma and discrimination by raising awareness and education. But the current situation related to this topic also affect future healthcare professionals. The latter are an important step in the improvement of health in general, which makes it important to also cater to them if we want to make a real change. The subsequent objectives are focused on affected population, the general public, as well as future healthcare professionals:
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