Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The U.S. Viral Hepatitis National Strategic Plan centers on every person knowing their status; to achieve this, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) calls for improved surveillance data and expanded hepatitis screening in a broad range of clinical environments, including the emergency department (ED). 1 Although a growing amount of all care -including preventive care -is provided in ED settings, little is known about how often EDs screen for viral hepatitis or about ED-specific barriers to implementing preventive health services like routine hepatitis screening.[1][2][3] We recently completed an updated assessment on the availability of a subset of preventive health services in a sampling of U.S. EDs; this included characterizing ED directors' perceived barriers to implementing these services.4 We found that nearly all U.S. EDs offer at least one preventive health service, many offer multiple, and the number of services offered has increased over time; however, among the services studied, we also found that hepatitis was one of the least commonly offered.4 The primary goal of this work to characterize U.S. EDs by whether they do (or do not) screen for hepatitis and to explore factors associated with screening.This study was a planned secondary analysis of a larger cross-sectional survey of preventive health services being offered in U.S. EDs. 4 As described elsewhere, the National Emergency Department Inventory (NEDI)-USA was used to obtain a random sampling of all U.S. EDs.4,5 From this 5.4% random sampling, ED directors were surveyed to characterize the availability of, and their preference for, a subset of 11 preventive health services.,4 Given current recommendations for viral hepatitis screening, this included determining whether they offer any form of hepatitis screening, excluding employee needle-stick based screening.6,7 The survey also obtained information on ED social worker availability,
Source: Sexually Transmitted Infections
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4398250968