Why Dispensers?
Using dispensers for community outreach is a popular, evidence-based strategy that allows organizations to provide access to essential health and wellness and harm reduction supplies, especially in underserved areas. Dispensers can help bridge the gaps in care by offering contactless, anonymous access to materials, bypassing many barriers including stigma, cost, privacy, or clinic hours.
Outreach is an integral aspect of healthcare, one that creates a connection to community members by providing them with targeted support, resources and services. Sexual Health Outreach is a combination of offering both products and education to support everyone’s ability to manage one’s sexual wellness with safer sex options.
What is a Dispenser?
In sexual health, a dispenser is a device designed to provide free or low-cost, oftentimes 24/7, access to essential sexual health and harm reduction supplies. These units are crucial public health tools that increase convenience, reduce stigma, and remove financial barriers to obtaining sexual health and wellness items.
The key aspects of dispensers for sexual wellness are as follows:
- Location & Accessibility: Located in educational facilities, public health offices, nightclubs, hospital waiting rooms, or other public spaces they allow for ease of access.
- Safer Sex Products: Condoms (both internal and external), lubricants, oral barriers, and even educational pamphlets can be distributed through dispensers.
- Goal: To prevent the spread of STIs, avoid unintended pregnancies, and support overall wellness through both product options and creating education and awareness.
- Accessibility & Privacy: They remove the embarrassment, stigma, and cost associated with purchasing supplies over-the-counter.
- Normalization: They help normalize the conversation around safer sex options, making it easier for people, particularly youth, to access resources privately.
- Wellness: They provide a discreet and confidential way for individuals to control their health
Personalize Your Outreach Dispensers
Outreach is a multi-faceted wellness approach. It requires a combination of awareness, often through educational supplies and messaging, along with the products for people to use to manage their sexual wellness. This messaging can be an integral part of your dispensers. The front of the dispenser is a perfect spot to highlight your messaging with a sticker or insert. This messaging can also be on the items you are dispensing, through creating small kits with stickers, having condom compacts with the messaging, or pamphlets expanding on your campaign.
Outreach for sexual wellness in Canada is a critical approach that connects with priority populations to reduce the transmission of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and prevent unintended pregnancies. By bringing these assorted resources directly to communities using dispensers, outreach addresses many different social and financial barriers to safer sex options. It reduces the stigma attached to sexual wellness, offers privacy, can help teach responsible sexual behavior options, and presents targeted communication to aid in awareness and education. It is only through offering both the education and the tools to support it that we can see people manage their sexual wellness.
What Can Go in Your Dispenser?
Pretty much anything! Dispensers can hold assorted wellness products. This can include external condom foils, internal condom sachets, oral barriers, lubricant foils, condom compacts, safer sex kits and assorted educational pamphlets to name a few. Our small dispenser holds 250 plus foils and the large dispenser holds 800 plus foils. They have a small dispensing opening at the bottom that allows your clients to access the products. They are made of high-impact clear plastic, easy to mount to the wall and have a locked top for ease of filling.
The versatility, visibility and cost effectiveness make dispensers an integral component of any sexual health harm reduction program.