E-mail and the world wide web are appropriate media for dissemination of general information, and STD Services can play an important role in community sexual health education by responding to requests. STD information can be researched by consulting reference material, such as diagnosis and management guidelines, basic STD facts and statistics. In many cases, the information requested is already available on the STD Services web site. The strategy for dealing with requests of this type is to refer the enquirer to specific sections of the web site. This reduces the need to individually supply existing information, and usually provides information additional to that requested.
Information relating to individual cases requires consultation with a health worker.
It is not appropriate to offer diagnosis or management advice or offer an assessment of STD risk because of inability to perform a physical examination, take a detailed history or perform investigations. To date, the approach of STD Services has been to respond to such enquiries with a standard message explaining the difficulty of assessment by e-mail and recommending that the person consult a doctor. An alternative approach might direct correspondents to a designated section of the STD Services web site which gives a range of possible diagnoses for given symptoms, reinforces the need to consult a doctor for diagnosis and provides an opportunity for further research of the conditions. The section includes a legal disclaimer as well as links to pages describing the STD check-up process. An improved method for managing information requests may be to use automatically generated responses to direct the person to a specific area of the web site, thus sparing STD Services administrative resources.