Assessing and redesigning the outreach services with street-based prostitutes in Coimbra, Portugal

Traditional studies tend to research on sex workers and to focus on the relationship between prostitution and epidemiology. Prostitutes are rarely involved in the design, implementation and evaluation of projects that concern them. Usually, these are run by NGOs and focus mainly on harm reduction and HIV prevention. We aim to assess and understand their opinions about the service, and any inherent discrimination, provided by the outreach teams. As the first, planning, step of an action research project, this study has adopted a descriptive and analytic qualitative methodology to answer the following research questions: 1) What is