Competing priorities

The biggest challenge has been prioritizing a patient’s agenda while addressing preventive care in every visit. Urgent competing priorities, including access to food, shelter, and safety, can overshadow preventive care. Including community support workers and case managers in the screening inquiry process has helped ease the burden for the clinical team.

Documentation practices

Standardizing documentation has been crucial to quality reporting through our electronic medical record. This has allowed us to monitor and report our progress sitewide and programwide.

Simple and creative interventions

Encouraging staff members to think of simple and creative interventions and providing venues to share best practices has been successful in reaching patients.

Having open access clinics for preventive health care is important.

Accomplishing follow-up

Patients should be informed of open access clinic hours, allowing options of when and where to receive their results.

Access to medical records should be provided via shared electronic health record across sites

A network approach should be implemented for contacting a patient by intentional redundancy

Trauma-informed care

Incorporating trauma-informed care to cervical cancer screening is key to building a comfortable, safe environment for the patient.

Such care included engaging in open conversations about a patient’s history, explaining the examination procedure, and addressing behavioral health needs.

Involve all stakeholders

Clinical and nonclinical staff must be educated about quality metrics and connecting them to the mission of the program.

The culture of process improvement must be infused throughout the program.

Multiple clinic staff should ask about and document screenings electronically.

Staff should collaborate with patients’ behavioral health care providers.

The strength of existing staff and patient trusting relationships can be used to educate staff and patients.