Theme: Epidemiology & Public Health Research Year: 2024
Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) has set the global goal to eradicate hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection by 2030. The prevalence of active HCV infection in Spain is 0.2%, but a considerable number of patients with silent infection are unaware of their status. Detection through screening strategies is indispensable and Emergency departments (ED) represent an opportunity to improve HCV screening in order to detect patients with silent infection and link them to healthcare system.
Methods: We set the screening program in the ED of our University Hospital, which attended 123,471 patients in 2023. We provided continuous training and developed a pre-configured HCV serology application.
Target population: patients aged 30-70 years who consult the ED and for whom an analysis was requested according to usual clinical practice. Those with a positive viral load (PVL) result were referred to a Gastroenterology consultation, who decided on subsequent care.
Results: The screening program began on June 1, 2023. In the first year we requested 3,974 serologies of the 15,245 that constituted our target population, achieving 26% of the objective. Of them, 121 (3.04%) were positive and 14 (0.35%) had PVL. There was a history of intravenous or inhaled drug abuse in seven patients (50%). We linked 13 of 14 (93%) patients with a PVL to a first Gastroenterology consultation.
Conclusion: The prevalence of patients with active HCV infection in our ED is 50% higher than the global prevalence recorded in Spain, which demonstrates the importance of screening in ED.
The opportunistic screening program in the ED has achieved a linkage to Gastroenterology consultations for 93% of patients with HCV PVL.
To achieve future automation will help to increase the number of patients tested, link those with PVL and thus converge with the WHO objective to eradicate HCV by 2030.