Health professionals have been key to the development and iteration of Apause over the past 20 years. 

Sexual health is a public health issue and schools rightly value involvement of health professionals. 

The adult delivered components of the original Apause programme were delivered by jointly trained teachers and health professionals (usually school nurses) co-delivering all the sessions in class.  This was always expensive and difficult to achieve in many areas of the country.  Their participation is some lessons is believed by us to significantly enhance the ApauseToo programme.

Health professionals have potentially very important roles in a good SRE programme which are detailed in a downloadable pdf file: Health Professional Roles in Apause.  They can be especially valuable in schools without specialist PSHE teaching teams as they may have more experience of the programme than many of the teachers and be particularly helpful for peer training and management roles

Health professionals bring :

• credibility to medical information in the programme
• familiarity with the language of personal health
• a long term involvement with the programme
• detailed and up-to-date knowledge of contraception and of STIs
• ease with the sensitivity of the personal issues
• an introduction to the friendly face of school and local youth oriented health services

Students and teachers value their key roles in the classroom for the above reasons