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Many healthcare professionals experience difficulties in discussing sexual health with their patients. The aim of this review was to synthesize results of studies on communication practices in interactions about sexual health in medical settings, to offer healthcare professionals suggestions on how to communicate about this topic.

We searched for studies using five databases. Reference lists and specialist bibliographies were searched to identify additional studies. We included discourse analytic studies that used recordings of medical consultations.

We identified five studies that met the inclusion criteria. Findings were synthesized into seven categories of practices deployed by patients and healthcare professionals when talking about sexual health: avoiding delicate terms (1), delaying potentially delicate words and issues (2), using assumptive talk (3), generalized advice-giving (4), deploying …