Re-evaluating current public health policy: alternative public health nursing approaches to sexually transmitted infection testing for teens and males who have sex with males.
OBJECTIVE: Due to a recent increase in the rates of reportable sexually transmitted infections (STI) across Canada, and the movement of public health nursing initiatives to a health promotion/illness prevention model, this paper proposes alternative strategies to current public health initiatives to encourage individuals who are labelled as at-risk by public health discourses, such as teens and males who have sex with males (MSM), to undertake preventative screening. THEORETICAL DESIGN: To undertake this task, we approached Health Canada's (2002) determinants of health utilizing Lupton's (1995) post-structuralist work on public health to suggest that for some members of these groups, health is not an imperative. CONCLUSIONS: As such, we propose that increasing anonymous testing and its advertisement would provide one means of providing population-sensitive care and could thus increase the screening rates of individuals within groups who reject the public health "healthy" disquisition.