Preferred options for receiving sexual health screening results: a population and patient survey

Abstract

Current genitourinary medicine patients (202) and potential future patients (542) completed a questionnaire-based survey to determine their preference for obtaining test results, their acceptability of including a named infection on contact slips and to report expectations about the acceptable length of an appointment. Overall, most respondents (78% [n = 582]) felt it unacceptable to be only contacted if their results were positive ('no news is good news'). In the clinic, a majority preferred a contact slip to be coded (68% [n = 137]), in the general public views were balanced. Significantly, more people in the general population expected an appointment to last no longer than 30 min (32% [n = 173] cf. 10% [n = 21], P < 0.001). A clear preference was expressed to receive sexually transmitted infection test results even if they are negative. Telephone and face-to-face contact were most popular with relatively few choosing mobile telephone text messaging or email as their preferred option.

Men’s Preferences for Sexually Transmitted Infection Care Services in a Low-Income Community Clinic Setting in New York City

“…Telephone notification of test results was the first choice of most men in our study, which is consistent with other studies on receiving sexual health screening results (Brown, Copas, Stephenson, Gilleran, & Ross, 2008). Men's acceptance of alternative test result notification methods, such as e-mail and text messaging, is promising.…”

What service users want: a new clinic results service. Can we satisfy both patients' needs and wants?

“…This supports the recent paper which revealed that patients prefer the 'human touch', i.e., prefer telephone and face-to-face contact rather than the newer technologies. 4 However, in our clinic very few patients chose to return for their results (0.2%), which may be a reflection of our particular clinic. We serve a mixed urban and rural population and travel distances/travel times can be considerable.…”

“…prefer telephone and face-to-face contact rather than the newer technologies. 4 For reasons of improved patient choice and improved clinical governance, we needed to change from NNIGN and so we asked our service users for their preferences for obtaining results. At the same time we also designed a new clinic results service to deliver normal/negative results to patients.…”

Understanding patient choices for attending sexually transmitted infection testing services: a qualitative study

“…20 Our results support the introduction of text messaging, especially as an alternative to the 'no-news-is-good-news' policy at GUM clinics that was consistently disliked in our sample and that is comparable to previous findings. 21 Strengths and weaknesses of the study A possible limitation of this study is that all the participants in our focus groups were current or previous users of STI testing services, and therefore, their preferences may differ from those with no experience of testing or those who choose not to test. We cannot comment on the distribution of testing services that participants had direct experience of as we wanted to limit the amount of personal data we collected about informants.…”