health services

This infographic summarises the Smart Sex Worker’s Guide to Community-led Responses to COVID-19.

Universal Health Coverage speaks to the global goal of providing all people with the health care they need without creating undue financial burdens on the individual. In many parts of the world, health provision and access to health services remains extremely poor, particularly for criminalised and marginalised populations such as sex workers and other key populations.

Sex workers were among the hardest hit at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to be impacted by this global public health crisis. The challenges that sex workers faced before COVID-19, as a result of criminalisation, stigma and discrimination, were all exacerbated by the pandemic.

The research project Sex Work and Mental Health: Access to Mental Health Services for People Who Sell Sex (SWMH) in Germany, Italy, Sweden and UK ran between March 2016 and December 2018.

This resource is a Community Guide to the Briefing Paper: Universal Health Coverage: Putting the Last Mile First. It provides an overview of the full Briefing Paper and provides key recommendations for international human rights and health bodies, national governments, and sex worker-led organisations.

You can download this 4-page Community Guide above. It is now available in English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Chinese.

Universal Health Coverage speaks to the global goal of providing all people with the health care they need without creating undue financial burdens on the individual. In many parts of the world, health provision and access to health services remains extremely poor, particularly for criminalised and marginalised populations such as sex workers and other key populations.

MSMGF, NSWP, INPUD, GATE, IRTG, GNP+ and ICW published this resource which concludes with a call to action for renewed commitment to HIV primary prevention strategies that are proactive, address upstream factors, and re-center communities most impacted by HIV. The resource and call to action pushes for HIV and other sexual health services that are led by or done with the community.

This NSWP briefing note provides information about the United States’ reinstatement and expansion of the Global Gag Rule, a policy that bans awarding certain forms of US global health funds to Non-US organisations that perform, actively give information about, or promote the legalisation of abortion.

In New Zealand, the Prostitution Reform Act was passed in 2003. Its purpose is to decriminalise prostitution. Following the Act, the Department of Labour, in cooperation with the New Zealand Prostitues Collective (NZPC), developed the Occupational Health & Safety guidelines for the sex industry. This article looks at the development and effects of the New Zealand approach. It was written by members of the NZPC and was published as part of Research for Sex Work 14: Sex Work is Work.

Sex workers are often talked about as facing high rates of violence, significant exposure to STIs, as well as work-related psychological stress. Yet even as sex workers are called ‘at risk’ by researchers and  health professionals, their health needs are unaddressed or unknown in many conventional health care settings. Peer-led health services provider Persist researched sex workers' experiences and with health services, as well as and what sex workers themselves wanted.