Health Service Focus

Express sexual health screening captures imaginations worldwide

A fledgling express sexual health screening service introduced by Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has generated worldwide interest. Leigh Chislett, clinic manager at Dean Street Express, and Alan McOwan, service director for sexual health at the trust, explain.

Dean Street Express, located in the heart of Soho, London, is an innovative and rapid sexual health screening service providing walk-in check-ups for symptom-free patients. Using the most up-to-date, sensitive near-patient testing equipment, results are generated in just a few hours – rather than days – helping to break the onward chain of disease transmission.

The trust has been operating a clinic in Dean Street since 2009, growing from one of London’s smallest sexual health clinics to the UK’s largest, seeing around 70,000 patients a year. This success led the trust to seek more efficient care models, and Dean Street Express, opened in early 2014, was the answer. Like most good ideas, its principle is quite simple: the provision of a quick, easy, convenient and high-quality service in a pleasant environment.

The ‘storefront’ design of Dean Street Express and its comfortable bar-like interior offer a welcoming environment, helping to remove the stigma attached to sexual health screening. Patients simply walk in at their convenience, check-in at the touch screen and then visit one of the self-screening suites and take their own samples. The entire process takes less than an hour, and results are delivered by text to the patient’s mobile phone later that day.

At the heart of the service lies the Cepheid GeneXpert Infinity System, which plays a key role in the fast, effective and modern service provided by Dean Street Express. Samples are transferred directly from the patient to the GeneXpert in the neighbouring laboratory, allowing cost-effective processing of large numbers of samples with turnaround times of just a few hours. The adoption of this near-patient testing capability has effectively reduced the average time from testing to treatment from 10 days to just two days, which is a huge benefit.

The award-winning Dean Street Express service has exceeded all expectations and, with over 300 visitors a day, is now busier than the casualty department at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Patient satisfaction is at an all-time high – 100 % of patient feedback is reported as good or excellent – and the number of people attending the clinic continues to escalate, driven by word of mouth and social media. As a result, Dean Street Express has upgraded its GeneXpert Infinity System twice to increase its sample testing capacity, enabling even more people to benefit from rapid sexual health screening and, where necessary, begin treatment immediately.

This innovative service model – presented at the recent 2014 IUSTI/BASHH Europe Congress – has generated global interest. Dean Street Express has found itself the focus of worldwide attention, drawing healthcare visitors from as far afield as Australia and the USA – as well as the UK and Europe – who are keen to learn more about this novel screening process with a view to implementing the practice in their own countries.

Dean Street Express has achieved phenomenal success in a very short space of time, and has succeeded in bringing sexual health screening into the open, generating discussion and removing much of the perceived stigma attached to attending such a clinic. The hope is that this efficient, cost-effective model will now be replicated elsewhere, enabling even more people to benefit from rapid, walk-in sexual health screening.

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