Screening Adolescent Females: An Evidence-Based Practice Research Project

Screening adolescent females for chlamydia has been a topic of concern to health care professionals. Adolescent females are at a high risk of contracting chlamydia because of high risk sexual behaviors. Chlamydia is the most common sexually transmitted infection that affects teen girls. This evidence-based practice (EBP) project will focus on substantiating an intervention (urine based chlamydia test or pelvic examination) that can assist in screening young women for chlamydia, during their annual comprehensive physical examination. The outcome for the EBP project will allow the researcher to assess whether adolescent women's compliance would increase with the urine based testing as opposed to a pelvic examination to collect vagina discharge, at a separate visit from the annual physical examination if they were given a choice. The literature has shown that many studies done on screening adolescent females for chlamydia support a noninvasive method for screening. School Based Health Centers (SBHC) in High Schools are the preeminent place to easily reach adolescents. The theoretical framework that was implemented during the course of this study is the Health Compliance Model-II (HCM-II) by Frank, Heiby and Lee. This model is a psychological behaviorism approach in comprehending and enhancing the students' compliance to health care treatments. A retrospective chart review will be used to collect data from the adolescent females' charts at three School Based Health Centers in the New York City area. The patients' charts will be reviewed in order to quantify demographic data, as well as the adolescent females' compliance and choice with one of the two testing methods. The target population will be adolescent females of all ethnicities between the ages 14-19 years of age. A minimum of 20-100 charts will be reviewed to assess if there was an increase in adolescent females using a noninvasive test. The EBP project will help to understand what could increase the adolescent females' compliance with screening for chlamydia.