Access and engagement with healthcare among vulnerable groups is a particular interest of mine. Supervised by Professor Helen Ward from Imperial College London School of Public Health, and veteran in the field of sex workers services, I focused my Global Health BSc project on the identification of current sex worker services in London, and assessed how the number of these services and their comprehensiveness have changed over time.
A report by the House of Commons in identified that there were around 60, to 80, sex workers in the UK 1. Although statistics on sex work are difficult to assess due to the transience and marginalisation of this community, these statistics highlight that there is a significant number of workers in the UK sex industry. Sex workers face a multitude of barriers to healthcare, of which stigma and discrimination play a large role, affecting both health and wellbeing 2.
During the s, a wide range of services specifically for sex workers were developed around the UK to increase their access to healthcare. Initially these services focused on control of STIs and HIV, but progressively developed to combat other issues faced by this community in terms of health and social care.
Comprehensive services provide holistic care for sex workers addressing their sexual, mental and general health as well as providing drug and alcohol services, counselling and outreach services, where resources are taken out onto the streets as well as into a variety of indoor locations. A study from the Praed Street Project in the 90s suggested that a third of sex workers were not registered with a general practitioner 3.
This suggested that many sex workers only accessed health and social care services through sex worker-specific services, rather than through GPs. Today, sex workers continue to face barriers to care and specialised services are known to be crucial for protecting health and wellbeing as well as increasing positive health outcomes 4.
