HealhFirst Network
216 South 3rd Avenue
Wausau, WI 54401
(800) 246-5743

Jesse Scharfenberg CEO of health first network talking about how reproductive health affects other areas of health and why is health first network essential we provide reproductive health care and there's many people that would probably argue that reproductive health care isn't essential, but your whole body is connected from head to toe. So each system is so important have to jump in analysis of what how can it not be essential. I thought I heard a lot of the bigger hospitals suffered, turn people away from you know testing in birth control and seeing patients when you're at home alone. I'm just to say that what you doing right and that's really interesting. We've heard that we seem kinds of action had an increase in client caseload right now. During the Covid pandemic because individuals are being seen health systems for reproductive healthcare because there was certain subsets of services at health systems that were deemed nonessential and when I heard this and I was thinking unlike how is reproductive healthcare nonessential. It is such an essential part of your body. It controls pregnancy and controls STI there's UTIs. So it is some of the system is known as TI and UTI and STB and all the stuff what it would've yeah sorry I like to use alphabet soup last thing that is lying me out and that STDs were sexually transmitted diseases and then back in 2015 2016 timeframe, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed it to STI which is sexually transmitted so that the same thing the same thing that STD STI is definitely interchangeable. We try to go with the new nomenclature of the STI so that we are in line with what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are utilizing UTI is a urinary tract infection. So a lot of individuals may confuse that they have been STI but it could be a UTI or someone may think they have a UTI and is actually nasty so bring those individuals in for testing and treatment is super super important. So infections can travel. So it's really important that we are having and performing STI testing on a normal basis. One of the big things that we do is screenings for cancer health first when you thinking about breast cancer we do clinical breast exams all the time, was sometimes the first line of defense of identifying some sort of nodule that were to refer an individual out for mammogram we do pass in politics after a Pap smear, an individual may have been identified that they have cancer cells of the next things that we can do here is actually doing a cervical biopsy to identify what's going on in referring an individual out. It's really unfortunate that individuals would think reproductive health is essential in that education around reproductive health is not essential because a lot of these things that we see we could prevent there's so many essays that could be prevented if an individual just knew how to prevent it. So let's use a condom. Let's practice safe sacs. We offer the HPV vaccine which is human papilloma virus that something that's in controversy over the past 10 years. I don't understand why Dixon is the only vaccine out there that prevents cancer and at that it prevents nine strains of the most common cancer causing strains of HPV cancer is given to both boys and girls in humans about Boys and Girls Club and which was really really cool last year we actually changed the age range, so it used to be €11-€26 and now 27 to 45-year-olds can receive the vaccine as well so working and continue to prevent cancer in individuals who are already sexually active as well. How can that be nonessential. I don't know. It was really interesting when this came out there was a lot of reproductive health clinics that can put services just on hold. I took an initiative and worked with you to perceive Wisconsin collaborative for reproductive health. The Wisconsin contraceptive access network and then Wisconsin family-planning reproductive health Association, which I serve as president for and said hey we need to put something out there to let individuals know that reproductive healthcare is an essential service. Individuals should have the choice of when they want to become pregnant, they should have the choice to go in for STI testing if they are sexually active. We know during this timeframe. Individuals are not ceasing sexual activity. So let's give them the tools to do it safely. Whether that be condoms and whether that be education or let them choose when they want to become pregnant by letting them properly space pregnancies or just prevent pregnancy with a contraceptive method. One of the things that kind of has his big black cloud over is the word abortion. Abortion is not something we do at health first. My personal mission is that an individual should never be in the position to have to make the choice as to whether they have an abortion or not, because we should be preventing every single pregnancy that wants to be prevented education having conversation with your staff over the last few hours today but I've learned quite a bit. Do offer educational services. We do we accept quite a few different educational services and we continue to look at expanding those we going to schools and give many presentations around, pregnancy prevention, contraception, and then STI prevention so that individuals know what. STI's are. They know that if you can be sexually active, you may become pregnant and how do you prevent that we give community presentations. We've instituted a really awesome curriculum in the Adams Friendship school district. It's called top the teen outreach program and it's really about building self-esteem and then talking about sexual health. On top of that, so we want to give them a good base at the sixth grade level to hopefully prevent some of those unintended pregnancies and STI rates that we are seeing in Adams so we provide a lot of education around that we have individuals that just come in for education and they may not be coming in at all for reproductive hands-on services, but just education. We have another really cool partnership down in Adams Friendship. It's called the diversion program so we know that individuals once they are in the juvenile justice system, they're more likely to be repeat offenders and continue to have charges that become worse and worse and worse. So our goal is to keep individuals out of the juvenile justice system and in that county. We were seeing a lot of young individuals being referred over to the DA for consensual sex acts. So maybe it was 215-year-olds having sex. Maybe they were texting pictures to each other. Our goal is, whether it be the district attorney's social services. The school or local police department identifies that and they actually refer the individual over to us for consequence education. So taking the educational route versus a prosecution route with those individuals and we have the school Health and Human Services local Sheriff's Department local police department. The DA everybody's involved in what we do with this huge prevention aspect of we have these kiddos there identified go over education with them once they refer to us. We have the local women's shelter come in and provide healthy relationship education and then when that charge actually goes across the DA's desk. The DA can see that they actually went through the educational session and most likely are going to pursue charges to put them into the juvenile justice system