'Do it yourself' sexual health care: the user experience.

Objectives: To describe client experience of self-management within a busy walk-in, sexual health service. Self-management in this context is self-registration and take-home pregnancy tests, chlamydia (Chlamydia trachomatis) and gonorrhoea (Neisseria gonorrhoeae) tests, or condoms dispensed from a free vending machine.

Methods: Twenty-four in-depth, semi-structured interviews with users; 19 structured written reports from mystery shoppers paid to visit the service and report their experience; demographic details of those using the self-management option from the clinic database and 40 h of recorded observation in the clinic waiting room.

Look who's taking notes in your clinic: mystery shoppers as evaluators in sexual health services.

Objectives: To test the feasibility of professional patients as a tool for sexual health service evaluation. Professional patients are paid to use services specifically for audit or evaluation purposes without disclosing their identity as evaluators.

Methods: Professional patients visited five large sexual health departments used by 3000 clients per week in two inner London Boroughs with very high rates of sexual ill health.

Involving service users in sexual health service development.

Objectives: The study objectives were to document users' experience of family planning and genitourinary medicine clinics and young people's services working within the time constraints of rapid service development and maximising the utility of this data for service improvement.

Methods: A total of 93 users of family planning and genitourinary medicine services participated in one of 13 facilitated discussion groups. Some 61% of the sample were women, 64% were aged over 25 years and 47% were Black Caribbean or Black African.

Community attitudes to the sexual behaviour of young people in an urban area with high rates of sexual ill-health.

Context: Adults in any community are a potentially important source of sexual health information for young people. Open discussion of sexual health issues is associated with low rates of sexual ill-health. Adults who disapprove of teenage sexual behaviour are poor sources of advice.

Barriers to the involvement of clients in family planning service development: lessons learnt from experience.

Context: Client involvement in service development underpins the Department of Health strategy for sexual health improvement in the UK. Participatory approaches to user consultation have been effectively piloted in this context but the responses of service providers to these data are rarely documented.

Objectives: Recruiting clinic users and training clinic users to interview their fellow clinic users on sexual health service use and to document staff responses to the results of this consultation.