translated from Spanish: Book clarifies the most frequent doubts about the sexuality of older adults

There are 42 questions answered by the book “Sexuality in the Elderly”, doubts raised anonymously with which you find working a research group composed of students and professionals of different it is careers of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Chile. They recognized the importance of addressing this issue as part of a social and community diagnosis to this specific group.
“We realized, and the students themselves realized, that they are not prepared to take on this theme,” explained Jhonny Acevedo, an academic in the Department of Primary Care and Family Health at the Faculty of Medicine and one of the authors of the text made by midwives, psychologists, sexologists, nurses, doctors and social workers.
The book, Acevedo explained, reveals and puts on the table a dimension of people’s health that has not been openly addressed by public policies or as part of the training of professionals in the area. This is despite the case that according to the 2016 National Survey of The Quality of Sex Life in Old Age, one-third of older people refer to having an active sex life and 65% consider this area of their life important, figures that correspond to different studies International.
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The issue of ageing in our country has been installed and addressed from different edges, but why has it not been so considered that of sexuality?
They’re different reasons. There is a very momentous line that has to do with sociocultural leaders. The country is just opening up to have a different look at things that have to do, for example, with gender diversity, because we have been a society that is also very traditionalist. Our republic is born with very strong foundations of traditionalisms, and where of course, the Catholic Church has also had a very important weight for some canons of behaviors and behaviors to be maintained for society that also mark us.
Today there is a greater openness of people to the knowledge of these issues, and feeling what they live in terms of sexuality is a topic that begins to be talked about more calmly. It is the children and grandchildren of older adults themselves who are making conversational topics that were previously taboo within the family.
There is another line of work that has a lot of influence, which has to do with public policy. Today public policies are in debt with the older adult. It must be acknowledged that there has been some progress in different governments, but what it has to do with health care in matters of sexuality of the elderly is not installed, and the professionals are also not prepared to solve those consultations and those Attentions.
In that sense, how should it be approached from politics? What would be some key points?
One thing that was evident with the gestation of this book for me and for the academic team, is that the students themselves realize that they are not prepared to take on this theme. There is a first focus: we have to prepare the different undergraduate professionals who are graduated.
Second, there is a whole gap to prepare professionals who are already working, because they also do not have training in sexuality, and in the older adult in particular. There are obviously exceptions, people who are forming, but if we do the sum of the number of professionals who should solve this in a primary care center, they are not prepared and there is a whole line of work to be done.
And third, since macro management, the Ministry of Health has the challenge of generating a specific policy that points to this topic, so that it goes down to all health services and to the municipalities, so that there can be a line of work of programs , objectives and actions aimed at this.
What dimensions are involved in addressing the sexuality of older adults?
In addition to seeing cognitive, psychological, emotional topics, there are also psycho-organic themes of an older adult sexuality that require care. It is necessary to address biological problems that affect their sexuality, and it is also necessary to attend to psychological and affective aspects through counseling – individual and family-based-, through anticipatory guidelines.
Why does the book suggest that sexuality in older adulthood is a human right?
All the conceptualizations we have of human rights associated with health in our country – in Latin America, in particular, and also in Europe – have always been showing that health care is a human right, that primary care is generally a fundamental human right, always reliering on care. However, sexuality never appears, and it turns out that all conventions, including the report of the United Nations Senior Committee, raise the importance of States having to play a key role, with a human rights approach, so that people can access the different attentions that are associated with policies within a country, including health care.
Sexuality is shown to be an important issue, it is a fundamental human need, and in the older adult more than ever, as the figures show. Psychological care, counseling in sexuality, resolution of a psychoemotional problem, or biomedical attention, improves people’s quality of life, so that it is obviously a human right that must begin to be relieved and take charge from the point of view of public health policies.

In the book they propose that sexuality goes beyond having sex. How is this expressed particularly in old age?
As the human being advances to be an adult and hence an adult, he is having a loss of an intrinsic ability, understood as the loss of his cognitive, physical, motor, sensitive, etc. abilities. We have to work preemptively on that loss of 50 and above all from 60 years and older, where what needs to be done is that the older adult has a good insertion with the medium in which it develops, for example , that has accessibility to all the spaces through which it transits, and above all has the ability to continue to participate actively in different things.
If we can keep this going, it’s going to mean that psychoemotionally and organically the person is going to be fine, and their sexuality is going to be better, understood not only as having intercourse, because sexuality at this stage of maturity is understood as having a relationship with affection or deeper affection with your partner, it can mean caressing with love, opening topics and talking them openly, and can mean even having sexual accessibility without having to reach intercourse. In short, go looking for other ways to find pleasure that goes beyond the organic and the coital.
What about other sexualities and gender expressions, with sexual dissent at this stage?
In this team participated actively and are among the expert professional authors of the Transdisciplinary School of Sexuality, and they are very much relied on this non-discrimination by gender, by tendency or sexual behavior.
Considering sexuality as a human right, there are people who have different sexual behaviors but are fully valid because they are people who have the right to feel sexually and who therefore have the right to express themselves. Today we are releasing that these people exercise this human right. What we lack there is an opening from the worthric and from the human because everyone has what they deserve.
In short, why should we investigate this issue and how can this book impact people?
The impacts of this book and the research we are carrying out are going to be very relevant to, first, bring the issue of the sexuality of the eldest adult to the contingency, because I insist, it is invisibilized from public policy, from the attentions in health and that has to change. We have to take care of this from care technicians. We have to take charge also from gender equity and from these new movements that emerge and that are part of the Chilean social reality of which we cannot put blindfolds in our eyes, and it is the look that our University has.

Original source in Spanish

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