Use of Brook services

Over 106,000 young people under the age of 25 used Brook Centres during 2005/06, the latest full year for which data is available.

Almost 20,000 young men visited Brook and now form 19% of all clients. This compares well with NHS family planning clinics where 8% of clients are men.

Nearly 70% of Brook's clients are under the age of 20.

44% of clients choose condoms as their main method of contraception and 28% choose the pill. The long term trend in pill use has been downwards, declining from the choice of 86% of clients in 1982. Pill use tends to increase with the age of the client.

7% of clients visiting Brook during 2005/06 were pregnant, the lowest the figure has been since the data was first collected.  60% of clients opted for termination of pregnancy at their first visit and a further 24% were undecided about what to do at that stage.

Brook Centres reached almost 90,000 young people through outreach and education work.   45% of contacts (where gender is known) were with young men.  87% of the young people worked with (where age is known) were 18 and under.    Most outreach and education work was carried out in schools and further education colleges (60%).

The Brook Young People's Information Service dealt with almost 21,000 enquiries during 2005/06.    These enquiries comprised around 12,000 calls, 7,000 online and 1,500 text enquiries.

67% of enquiries were from people aged 20 or under and about a third of these were under 16.  20% of enquiries were from boys and young men.

The most common subject of enquiry at 18% was contraception (including emergency contraception).   13% of enquiries related to sexually transmitted infections and another 13% were about pregnancy.    9% of enquiries related to abortion and 8% were general sex and relationships queries.

Almost 26% of enquirers were referred to their nearest Brook Centre or young people's service, 8% to other contraception services and 7% to infection testing services.  15% of enquiries were answered without requiring a referral.

During 2005/06 there were over 15 million hits to the Brook website by over 660,000 people.