Who declines to give a name at a sexual health service?

Objective: To characterise patients who decline to provide their surname at a public sexual health centre.

Methods: A case-control study of all patients first attending the Sydney Sexual Health Centre from 1998 to 2004, using proforma-collected electronic data to compare patients who did not provide their surname with those who did. In addition, the frequencies of the 10 most common surnames in the Sydney telephone directory were compared with the frequency of those names in the patient database.