Get tested. It is not a big deal.

Getting tested is a normal part of looking after yourself, in the same way a dental check-up is. It is not an admission, it is not a confession, and it does not say anything about you except that you look after your health.

In the UK it is free on the NHS and confidential. You do not need a GP referral, you do not have to explain yourself, and clinics see thousands of people a week who are there for exactly the same reason you are.

• A sexual health clinic. Free, confidential, walk-in or booked. Find your nearest on the NHS service finder.
• A postal test. Many areas post you a kit, you take the samples at home and send them back. Start from the same NHS page — what is available depends on where you live.
• Your GP can test for some things, though a sexual health clinic tests for more and is used to it.

How often is worth asking the clinic rather than a website. As a rule of thumb, at least once a year if you are having sex, and more often if you have more partners — people on PrEP are usually tested every three months as part of the programme.

PrEP is medication that prevents HIV. It is free on the NHS through sexual health clinics across the UK, and the clinic tests you regularly while you are on it. Ask at any clinic, or read the NHS page on PrEP.

U=U — undetectable equals untransmittable. Somebody living with HIV who is on effective treatment, with an undetectable viral load, cannot pass it on sexually. That is settled, not a hopeful claim, and it is the single fact that does most to make the stigma pointless.

DoxyPEP — which plenty of UK clinics call DoxyPrEP, because it is usually handed over alongside PrEP — is a single dose of doxycycline taken after sex to reduce the chance of picking up syphilis. The UK has had a national guideline for it since June 2025 — one of the first countries to publish one — which recommends 200 mg within 24 hours of sex, and no later than 72 hours, for gay and bisexual men and trans women at elevated risk of syphilis, with clinicians free to consider it for others case by case. See the BASHH guideline.

It is meant to sit alongside testing, condoms, vaccines and HIV prevention rather than replace any of them — the guideline says so itself. Whether it is right for you is a conversation with a clinic, which is also where you get it.

Both names are in use and your clinic may well say DoxyPrEP. Strictly the two words mean different things — PEP is a dose after sex, PrEP is something taken beforehand — and what the UK guideline describes is the dose after sex. If your clinic uses the other name they almost certainly mean the same thing; it is still worth asking them exactly when to take it.

Since August 2025 England has run the world’s first gonorrhoea vaccination programme, offering the 4CMenB vaccine through sexual health clinics to those at highest risk. The same appointment is usually where mpox, hepatitis A and B, and HPV vaccines are offered.

Eligibility is the clinic’s call and the details differ across the UK. The point is to ask — several of these are free, and people who could have them often do not know they exist. The programme’s own questions and answers spell out who it is for.

Because the thing that keeps people from testing is rarely not knowing where to go. It is the idea that needing a test says something shameful about you. It does not, and a site built around kink events is in a poor position to pretend otherwise.

You can say on your profile that you test regularly, if you want to. It is entirely optional, it is your own statement rather than anything Collr checks, and it says nothing about your results or your status — Collr does not ask for those, store them, or want them. Turn it on from your profile settings.

Nobody is ranked, sorted or filtered by it, and nothing on Collr treats its absence as an answer.