New STD clinic opens near Utrecht Central Station

Visitors are tested as anonymously as possible. The STD clinic does not have a waiting room where visitors could run into acquaintances, but rather individual, screened-off waiting rooms. All intimate questions are asked in advance online and the visitor does not have to discuss those questions with the nurse when they visit. The prices differ per STD test and range from 14 to 60 euros.

"Many young people in the Netherlands have difficulty accessing STD care, not to mention the threshold for taking a test is often high," Bas Mourik, a medical microbiologist affiliated with the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), is quoted by the newspaper AD as saying. 

Mourik founded Sensible Infection Care (Dutch acronym: ZIZ) in 2018 to meet the increasing demand for STD care. Last year, the demand for STD consultations increased and more patients were diagnosed with STDs. Gonorrhea was prevalent among university students or young people with a higher education degree.

Test locations in Utrecht
In Utrecht, students can take a free STD test at GGD Utrecht, which has a branch in the Town Hall. They don't have many spots for STD tests there, so they often refer patients to the general practitioner. The basic insurance covers STD care at the general practitioner level, but this is deducted from their "own risk". Students can also order an STD self-test online. In the past, students could also go to the STD clinic at UMC Utrecht, but that clinic closed in 2018 and STD care was transferred to GGD. This way, the approach to STDs would be the same in the entire Utrecht region.