Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to encourage postal tests and other alternative routes for chlamydia screening; how many postal tests for chlamydia were used in each of the last five years; and how many providers of such services there are.

The current National Chlamydia Screening Programme (NCSP) advice is that health service based screening may be supplemented by high quality internet-based testing. This is highlighted in the NCSP Standards for Chlamydia Screening, Equity of Access Report and Guide on Involving Young Men in Chlamydia Screening. The Public Health England (PHE) sexual health facillitator team advocate this to local commissioners and providers. Internet testing is attractive to some population sections, especially men.

Currently PHE does not collect information specifically on remote testing delivered through postal kits. Therefore the current number of such providers cannot be ascertained. PHE has applied to the Standardisation Committee for Care Information to introduce data collection on postal testing commissioned by local authorities.

The remote testing data for five years collected prior to 2012 by the NCSP is shown in the table below:

Notes:

1. Data includes chlamydia tests carried out on people aged between 15 and 24 years.

2. Remote testing data (which included kits sent via mail outs, kits requested over the telephone or online).

3. Chlamydia activity data reported by PHE are based on primary care, community service and Genitounirary medicine clinic chlamydia data.

4. Data includes tests where sex is male, female, and unknown/unspecified. Data includes all screening tests, diagnostic tests and tests on contacts.

5. Data includes chlamydia tests among people accessing services located in England who are also residents in England.

6. Data represents the number of tests reported, and not the number of people tested.

7. Data presented are based on tests with confirmed positive and negative results only. Tests with equivocal, inhibitory and insufficient results have been excluded as most people with these results are retested.

8. The data were extracted on 13 August 2012.

9. Where an area of residence cannot be assigned, data are excluded.