Dr. Reed currently has a grant that allows Cincinnati Children’s Hospital to offer universal GC and CT screening to all pediatric ED patients between the ages of 14 and 21.

“We are using a tablet to offer the screening to adolescents and are integrating their responses into our electronic medical record,” she told Reuters Health. “The goal is to reach those adolescents who are at high risk and otherwise would not have any opportunities to be screened for STIs.”

Echoing the authors’ advocacy of ED screening for adolescents, Dr. Mobeen H. Rathore, immediate past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and chief, Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Immunology at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Jacksonville, told Reuters Health by email, “It’s not ideal for anybody to get their primary care in the emergency department. But until we fix the issue of primary care for everyone, not just children and adolescents, we need to make the best of the time and circumstances when we have access to our patients who are at high risk. We have to capture them when we can.”

Once acute problems have been addressed, the ED provides an opportunity “not just to test for STIs, but also to give vaccines and take other preventive measures,” Dr. Rathore continued. “Normally, we don’t want to think that routine care will be done in the ED, but in this population, we should do as much as we can.”