Barriers to the provision of sexual health services for people with disabilities: a systematic review

Disabled people have the same sexual needs as other people. The purpose of this study was to identify barriers to the provision of sexual health services for people with disabilities. The review was conducted on quantitative and qualitative studies on barriers to provision of sexual health services to people with disability using the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) approach for systematic review research. Several databases including: Scopus, ProQuest, Web of Science, MEDLINE, Science Direct, were searched to retrieve studies on the topic in English biomedical literature from 2006 to 2022. A manual search of reference lists was also performed. Primary studies were reviewed to identify barriers to providing sexual health services to people with disabilities from the perspectives of people with disabilities and health care providers. Two researchers used Newcastle-Ottawa tool for observational studies and JBI-QARI tool for qualitative studies to assess the quality of the articles and extracted their main findings independently. A total of 207 studies were identified. Of these, only 21studies were eligible for analysis. A total of 32 barriers were identified and classified into four levels: structural and organizational, individual, socio-cultural, and policy-related barriers. people with disabilities faced numerous barriers in receiving sexual health services. Indeed, identifying problems, and implementing interventions to reduce or remove these barriers is vital to improve the access of People with disabilities to sexual health services and their sexual rights. Sexual health is the foundation of reproductive health. People with disabilities have many unmet needs in sexual health and have less access to sexual health services due to social, economic and cultural barriers. Attention to sexual needs and identifying barriers and removing them can improve their sexual and reproductive health.