Sexual Health in the Emergency Room
During my residency training, I collaborated with Dr. Sara Holmstrom on a needs assessment analyzing the quality of sexual healthcare for the adolescent population at Lurie Children’s. We found that our providers needed education and guidance on best practices for adolescent care. We used the results from the needs assessment to create an algorithm for sexual health in the pediatric emergency room. This algorithm is currently in place at Lurie Children’s Hospital and is used for provider education and patient care.
I’ve taken this work to Vanderbilt where I currently work as a pediatric emergency medicine fellow. I’ve developed a confidential note template specifically for adolescent care and am working on a quality improvement project to increase use of the template and protect patients’ confidential information.
To the left, see the data that inspired our clinical care guideline. In brief, we found that adolescent females in our emergency room were appropriately screened for pregnancy risk by all doctors (attendings and residents) about 21% of the time. We also found that a sexual health history was documented in only a quarter of encounters. This highlighted to our team the need for more provider education around sexual health and influenced the development of the above algorithm.