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Background: Recruiting to trials is complex and difficult. The Prevention of Pelvic Infection (POPI) trial aims to see if screening women for chlamydia and treating those found to be infected reduces the incidence of pelvic inflammatory disease in the following twelve months. It focuses on young, sexually active, multiethnic, mainly inner city, female students. The main aim of this paper is to describe our recruitment methods. Secondary aims in two small subgroups, are to compare characteristics of women recruited with those not recruited, and to explore participants' understanding of when their samples would be tested for chlamydia.

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Sexual health services: a third way?Sir: In the 6 June issue of the International Journal of STD and AIDS, Hambly and Luzzi 1 reported that it is important to give people a choice of provider of sexual health services, namely either a genitourinary (GU) clinic or a general practitioner (GP). A third alternative might be providing postal specimens. In April 2006, we sent postal swabs to 231 female students taking part in a chlamydia screening trial. 2 They were aged between 16 and 27 years and a third were from ethnic minorities.The response rate was 61% (141/231), of which 20 swabs came back after a reminder phone call or email. Responders and non-responders were similar demographically: 30% of responders (42/141) and 25% of non-responders (35/141) were from ethnic minorities; 11% of responders (16/141) and 14% of non-responders (20/141) were aged 20 years or younger. Six of the 141 samples (4.3%) tested positive for chlamydia. Five were new infections in women who had a negative test 12 months earlier, giving an incidence of new infection of 3.5%.This 61% response rate compares favourably with other studies. Many of the women participating in our study were black teenagers recruited from Further Education colleges in deprived areas of South London -a high-risk group notoriously difficult to reach. However, all the women had agreed to return the postal swabs and all had previous experience of the testing kit when they were recruited to our trial 12 months previously.