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Partnership for Male Youth Announces Founding Partners for Groundbreaking National Campaign

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Leading national health organizations and health leaders join in unprecedented collaboration to improve the health of adolescent and young adult males

The Partnership for Male Youth (www.partnershipformaleyouth.org) has announced its founding members, fifteen national and state organizations that will collaborate on ways to address the unmet health care needs of our nation's young males. 

Adolescent and young adult (AYA) males - those between the ages of 10 and 26 - receive minimal health care; for them health care consists largely of sports physicals and an occasional visit to the emergency room. Yet, according to the most recent data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, AYA males are at higher risk than their female contemporaries for:

  • death by suicide  
  • ADHD diagnosis   
  • substance abuse   
  • homicide   
  • risky behaviors   
  • accidental injury   
  • certain sexually transmitted infections.1 

In addition, AYA males are half of the teen unintended pregnancy equation and can pass on undiagnosed sexually transmitted infections to their sexual partners.

The Partnership for Male Youth has been created to address this issue. It has emerged from the health related work of The Boys Initiative, a young nonprofit organization, but it is an independent collaboration among stakeholders in AYA male health. 

In late 2012 the Initiative began researching the state of health care for AYA males, with an eye toward developing solutions to improve their health.  It conducted an extensive literature search and interviews with over 150 organizations and health care experts from a range of medical and health care disciplines. Based on findings from this undertaking and with the guidance of dozens of medical and health care experts, the Initiative developed a clinical resource for health care providers, which it released in January 2014: the Health Provider Toolkit for Adolescent and Young Adult Males.  

The Toolkit is the Partnership’s flagship effort.  It is groundbreaking and will serve as the foundation for other project activities to enhance health, and health care delivery, for AYA males. These will include provider, patient and parent education initiatives designed to enhance provider skills and knowledge while engaging AYA males in their own health care. "These are all pieces of the health care puzzle for our young males, and they need to be assembled and addressed in a coherent fashion if we are to succeed in our mission," said Dennis Barbour, executive director of the Partnership.

"The fact is that if  we care about the health of future generations, male and female, we need to start addressing the unmet health care needs of AYA males now," said Barbour. "In developing the Toolkit we have been fortunate to have been guided by some of our nation's leading experts in adolescent health. We are now honored to be joined in the effort to build upon it by so many of our nation's leading adolescent health care organizations. We expect other organizations to join us as well as we move forward with this exciting endeavor," he said.

The founding organizational members of the Partnership are:

1. Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011

Dennis J. Barbour, Esq.

Executive Director

Partnership for Male Youth

barbour@partnershipformaleyouth.org

202-841-7475

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Quick facts

AYA males are at higher risk than their female contemporaries for: death by suicide ADHD diagnosis substance abuse homicide risky behaviors accidental injury certain sexually transmitted infections.1
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