Background Access to STD screening and HIV testing are important components of sexual and reproductive health care for adolescents. However, few youth have ever had an STD or HIV test, suggesting a need for new approaches to linking adolescents to care. Project Connect is an 8 year, quasi-experimental study of a multi-level intervention to prevent STD, HIV, and teen pregnancy. The Health Systems Intervention component was designed to provide an effective conduit to link youth to available health care services. Community health care providers who offered adolescents high quality care were identified and recruited for a referral system implemented through school nurses.

Methods Six intervention and six control high schools in a public school district in the Los Angeles, California area participated in the study. Analyses included survey data from 6623 sexually experienced (ever engaged in sexual intercourse) and 4703 sexually active (engaged in intercourse in the past 3 months) female high school students across 5 years (T1–T5). Both samples were 78% Latino and 13% African American; the mean age was 16.6. A mixed model logistic regression analysis was used to test for intervention effects. Random effects on the student level were included to control for repeated measures.

Results Statistically significant intervention effects were observed overall among both samples (see Abstract O2-S2.01 table 1 for adjusted OR and 95% CIs for sexually experienced sample) for receiving STD testing or treatment in the past year and ever being tested for HIV. At T1, for example, 18% of sexually experienced intervention females reported being tested/treated for an STD in the past year; at T5, 29.2% reported having done so. In the control condition, 17% reported STD testing/treatment in the past year at T1, which remained relatively stable by T5, at 19.9%. Among sexually experienced females statistically significant increases were also found for ever being tested for an STD.

Conclusions Project Connect was successful in linking female adolescents to sexual and reproductive health care through high school nurses. Rather than attempting to change provider behaviour, this structural intervention capitalises on existing, adolescent-focused expertise among local medical providers. It is a low-cost, sustainable strategy for linking (or ensuring access for) adolescents to care and could be widely implemented.