Background:
The STD Hotline Project utilizes trained health educators who provide free, confidential information to callers in English and Spanish during regular business hours. Commonly-asked questions include STD symptoms, prevention methods, methods for telling sex partners about their diagnosis and clinic referrals. Staff frequently assist callers in coping with the stigma that often accompanies an STD diagnosis. Callers can also opt for an automated phone system which is available 24 hours to answer common questions about STDs.

Objective:
To describe the characteristics of STD hotline callers to inform health education programming.

Method:
Intake data was analyzed of all hotline callers (n=1,298) who spoke to a health educator in 2004.

Result:
Most common reasons for calling the hotline were: questions about STDs (54%), clinic referrals/testing (30%) and requests for condoms/other (16%). Approximately 40% of calls occurred during the summer months, and the most common diseases asked about were herpes (25%), HIV/AIDS (16%), HPV/genital warts (15%), chlamydia (12%) viral hepatits (10.1%), gonorrhea (7.2%), syphilis (5.1%) and other (9.6%). Callers heard about the hotline through phone book/operator (22%), another agency/clinic (20%), outreach or promotional materials (18%), print/radio/website (14%), friend/family (9%) other hotline (5%), unknown (5%) and other (7%). Among callers who requested a referral to a public STD clinic (n=386), only 8% of requests were to clinics located in areas with the highest STD morbidity.

Conclusion:
Preliminary results suggest that the STD Hotline should be promoted in areas with STD morbidity.

Implications:
An STD hotline is an innovative health education method for providing risk reduction information to the community.