Health Equity Considerations for Screening and Diagnosis of Sexually Transmitted and Blood-Borne Infections Impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Timely access to sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections (STBBI) testing and linkages to care are directly dependent on confirmed medical diagnosis, referred to as the first element of the cascade of care. Access to STBBI testing was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in a variety of ways. This pandemic mobilized some public health innovations, reducing roadblocks in the STBBI cascade of care. Objective: The overarching objective of this scoping review was to identify and map available peer-reviewed and open-access gray literature on public health and community-based innovations for testing, screening, and diagnosis of STBBIs during the COVID-19 Pandemic, in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Methods: MEDLINE (Ovid), CINAHL (EBSCO), Embase (Elsevier), Social Services Abstracts (ProQuest), Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest), Google, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ , and Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health Gray Matters were searched between September 2022 and September 2023. During this period, title and abstract screening were completed by three pairs of reviewers. Full text screening and data extraction were completed by two pairs of reviewers. Conflicts were resolved by S.M.G. and J.G. Community engagement was iterative, including regular meetings (two per year) with key stakeholders and rights and title holders. No methodological deviations to note. Data are presented in figure and tabular form and summarized. Results: A total of 7,108 peer-reviewed literatures underwent title and abstract screening, and over 800 gray literatures were considered. Thirteen peer-reviewed and 43 gray literatures, on public health and community-based innovations for testing, screening, and diagnosis of STBBIs in OECD countries, were identified. Results confirmed STBBI resources were eliminated or redirected during the pandemic, while some were adapted, resulting in significant innovation and emphasizing the resourcefulness of those working in this service area. Although novel approaches were identified (e.g., barber shop-based testing), many innovations captured were examples of repurposing existing approaches or reintroducing innovations not implemented. Included literature represented 6/38 OECD countries and six of the common STBBIs. Community-based approaches, developed with existing community-led initiatives show great promise, and dominated the literature. Conclusions: The pandemic motivated public health and community-based innovation, including reimplementation of initiatives previously experiencing barriers to implementation. Many of these innovations shifted screening from clinical settings to community-based settings. Including gray literature enriched the review, as it highlighted ongoing research and community-led research that were not published in academic journals. This scoping review has identified several concepts and innovations that can be explored and evaluated further.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.038 | 0.188 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.021 | 0.017 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".