Sexual history-taking remains critically deficient among surgical trainees, and while an educational intervention did not increase the likelihood of taking a sexual history, it did result in trainees asking significantly more sexual health questions when they did take one.
An educational intervention did not result in trainees being more likely to take a sexual history overall.
Trainees in the intervention group asked significantly more questions regarding sexual health than the comparison group when they did take a sexual history.
A persistent gap in sexual history-taking exists among surgical trainees and clinicians.
Increasing specialization in medicine raises the risk of anchoring diagnoses and partitioning of care.
Clinicians have a professional responsibility to ask sexual health questions in order to provide appropriate counseling and recognize patient risk factors.
This research suggests that surgeons and surgical trainees frequently fail to ask patients about their sexual and reproductive health history, and that this omission can lead to missed diagnoses and lost opportunities to counsel patients about important health risks. A study referenced in this commentary tested an educational program designed to improve sexual history-taking among trainees. While the program did not make trainees more likely to bring up sexual health topics in the first place, those who did received training asked more thorough and complete sexual health questions compared to those who did not receive the training. The authors argue that as medicine has become increasingly specialized, there is a growing tendency for surgeons to focus narrowly on the presenting problem and rely heavily on advanced diagnostic tests, which can cause them to overlook fundamental aspects of patient care like a complete medical history. Sexual and reproductive health is one area that is particularly likely to be skipped, yet it is directly relevant to many surgical conditions and patient safety decisions. This research suggests that simply providing education about how to conduct a sexual history may not be enough to change whether clinicians ask these questions at all — pointing to deeper barriers such as discomfort, time pressure, or assumptions about relevance. Addressing these barriers is important because incomplete histories can result in wrong or delayed diagnoses and mean that patients miss out on guidance about reproductive health, sexually transmitted infections, and related concerns.
Chinn J, Hawn M. (2025). The Importance of Sexual History-Taking Within Surgery.. Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0000000000005965