Achieving safer sex with choice: studying a women's sexual risk reduction hierarchy in an STD clinic

A flexible, risk-reduction approach, as compared with a single method approach, may increase sexually transmitted disease (STD)/HIV protection for women attending STD clinics. A brief intervention was tested in an observational study of 292 STD clinic patients in three distinct cohorts. These included subjects counseled on (1) the "women's safer sex hierarchy of prevention methods" (hierarchy cohort, n = 118), including the female condom (FC), male condom (MC), diaphragm, cervical cap, and spermicides, (2) MC only (n = 62), or (3) FC (n = 112) only. We evaluate method use and level of protection achieved at 6-month follow-up among the women in the hierarchy cohort and compare the level of unprotected sex across the three cohorts, using ordinal logistic regression analyses and an imputation procedure to account for attrition. In the hierarchy cohort, the MC, FC, spermicidal film, foam, suppository, and diaphragm were used with main partners by 80%,46%, 37%, 28%, 17%, and 5% of women, respectively. Spermicides were used frequently, mainly in conjunction with condoms. As compared with hierarchy subjects, both MC cohort subjects (OR = 2.3, p = 0.01) and FC cohort subjects (OR = 1.6, p = 0.11) were more likely to report 100% unprotected sex. The tendency for subjects to move toward higher levels of protection was observed most strongly in the hierarchy group. Hierarchical-type counseling, compared with single method counseling, leads to increased protection during sex among women at high risk of STD/HIV infection and should be implemented in STD clinics.