Nursing Student Spreads Safe-Sex Awareness Among Older Adults

Sex education is a subject that most envision being taught in a high school classroom, but Samuel Merritt University (SMU) nursing student Phyllis Carroll is discussing condom use and sexually transmitted diseases in the most unlikely of places — senior citizen centers.

Carroll, one of six SMU students selected to receive the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Fellowship (ASF) for 2016-2017, will spend the next year educating low-income seniors about sexual health at centers located in some of San Francisco’s most underserved neighborhoods. 

“If you had asked me a year ago about discussing sexual health with older adults, I would have been squeamish and uncomfortable about it,” says Carroll. “I thought to myself: seniors don’t have sex. It’s such a taboo topic because most people don’t like to think about their parents having sex.”

Her attitude changed last fall when she began her community health rotation for SMU’s Entry Level Master of Science in Nursing Family Nurse Practitioner Program. Carroll and two other students were assigned to the Canon Kip Senior Center in San Francisco, which serves adults 60 years and older — more than half of whom are currently or formerly homeless.

The students educated the seniors about managing diabetes, high blood pressure and a variety of other healthcare topics of interest to the older adults.  The center’s director asked the students to also do a sexual health seminar.

To prepare, Carroll did some research and discovered that there was a gap in clinical settings about sexual health because healthcare providers don’t want to offend their older patients by raising the issue, yet seniors want their providers to initiate the conversation. On top of that, she learned that sexually transmitted disease rates are on the rise among older adults.

“It’s a myth that seniors are asexual,” she says.

When Carroll presented her first sexual health seminar to a diverse group of 45 seniors, she found that they were excited to talk about the issues. She learned that the only sex education the women had when they were younger focused on staying abstinent to avoid getting pregnant. Also, there were plenty of misperceptions among both male and female participants about their risk of contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, and about how medications for chronic diseases in older adults can pose challenges to being sexually active.

That inspired her to design a 12-week sexual awareness program for senior centers that would dispel myths and train volunteer peer educators to carry it forward. It won Carroll a Schweitzer Fellowship, which immerses a select group of graduate students in yearlong projects that address the health needs of underserved communities.

Miriam Eisenhardt, MPH, RN, an SMU assistant professor of nursing, says Carroll embodies the mission of the ASF. 

“She is a real change agent willing to take a leap and committed to creating programs for vulnerable, diverse and underserved communities, “ says Eisenhardt, who is serving as Carroll’s faculty mentor. “Her thoughtful and compassionate leadership and vision promise that this project will not only significantly contribute to this community need, but also to student leadership in the School of Nursing’s FNP program and to her professional development as a future FNP.”

Carroll says that before she embarked on the project, she had a negative view of seniors as sickly and struggling with chronic disease. Working with them has changed her perspective.

“They have such a wealth of life experience to share with me,” she says. “I’m learning from them at the same time.”