New recommendations of Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine (SEMES) for emergency department diagnosis of HIV infection based on results from Spain's "Leave Your Mark" program
Abstract
Hidden infections and late diagnoses are currently the main challenges of the HIV pandemic. Emergency departments (EDs) are one of the health care system's key resources addressing these challenges. In 2020, the Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine (SEMES) published recommendations for ordering HIV serology testing for patients with certain health conditions, and in 2021 SEMES launched the "Leave Your Mark" (Deja tu Huella - DTH) program to facilitate implementing the recommendations during emergency care. The present consensus paper, based on 3 years of experience with the program, was drafted to give new support to the DTH project. Participating hospitals ordered 129 617 serologies over 3 years, leading to 1620 new HIV diagnoses. One out of every 5 new HIV diagnoses in Spain is now made in an ED, but there is still room for improvement. To that end, this paper contributes 7 concrete proposals: 1) update the DTH program's criteria for ordering serology by including unexplained thrombocytopenia, fever with no focus of infection, and former residence in a country with endemic HIV infection; 2) include serology for hepatitis C virus infection at the time HIV testing is ordered; 3) reinforce the importance of obtaining the patient's informed consent for testing, meeting the obligation to respect the individual's rights; 4) implement educational programs; 5) develop decision-making tools (forms for ordering tests, alerts in patients' histories); 6) involve nurses in the DTH…
Read the paper
Related studies
- The Matrisome: In Silico Definition and In Vivo Characterization by Proteomics of Normal and Tumor Extracellular Matrices
- The Escherichia coli MG1655 in silico metabolic genotype: Its definition, characteristics, and capabilities
- In silico pharmacology for drug discovery: methods for virtual ligand screening and profiling
- In silico prediction of splice-altering single nucleotide variants in the human genome
- In silico clinical trials: how computer simulation will transform the biomedical industry
- In silico optimization of a guava antimicrobial peptide enables combinatorial exploration for peptide design
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.