The pressure on the Ottawa Sexual Health Centre to meet the high demand for sexual health services in the city has led the Centretown Community Health Centre, along with six other Ottawa organizations, to team up to establish GayZoneGaie, the first sexual health clinic in Ottawa designed exclusively for gay men.
On the Ottawa Sexual Health Centre’s website, a message at the top corner of the page says that potential patients may encounter difficulty in accessing the clinic’s services to due the high service demands.
Some visitors, according to the notice, may even be asked to come back another day.
Cathy Collett, manager of primary care and social services at the Centretown Community Health Centre, says the possibility of being turned away from the city’s sexual testing facility was an alarming one for Ottawa’s gay community.
“It became necessary to do something for this vulnerable population, which has had a rough history with sexually transmitted diseases,” Collett says.
The one-year pilot project opened its doors at the Centretown Community Health Centre, located in the heart of the gay village, on Sept. 25. The first men inside were greeted with a welcome sign trimmed in the bright colours of the rainbow gay pride flag, pamphlets on practicing safe sex, and posters featuring gay-positive images, such as two men in tuxedos fresh from their wedding ceremony.
GayZoneGaie offers free, confidential on-site treatment and screening for STIs and HIV, as well as free condoms and counseling. It plans on running seminars for gay youth and men questioning their sexuality. Collett says recreational programs, like the free yoga lessons being offered for the centre’s first five weeks, will also be a permanent feature of the clinic.
“It’s not just about sex,” Collett says. “It is about an overall wellness approach to helping improve the lives of gay men living in Ottawa.”
Barry Deeprose, co-chair of the Ottawa Gay Men’s Wellness Initiative, the organization which first proposed the project in 2007, agrees that the clinic will help gay men achieve better overall health and says GayZoneGaie is “an idea whose time has come.”
According to Deeprose, the clinic’s main function is to reduce the number of men becoming infected with STIs and HIV. Almost two out of every 100 gay men in Ottawa is HIV-positive, the highest percentage in Ontario, according to a study by Dr. Robert Remis at the University of Toronto.
“Many men don’t even know they’re infected, and the city is so overburdened [by the demand for testing],” Deeprose says. “But GayZone will make testing more accessible so there will likely be fewer new cases.”
Roger Prasad, supervisor of clinical services at the Ottawa Sexual Health Centre, agrees that GayZoneGaie will increase accessibility for sexual health services in the city.
“It may even draw in a whole demographic of people who chose not to come to our clinic,” Prasad says.
All of the organizations behind GayZoneGaie have donated the staff and resources necessary to run the clinic, which is open every Thursday from 5 p.m. until 8 p.m. The money to operate the facility is being reallocated from the Ottawa Sexual Health Centre. No new funds were earmarked for the project.