Study looks at use of chaperones during genitourinary exams

In this video, Ellen Cahill, MD, discusses the background and notable findings from the study “The Use of Chaperones for Genitourinary Exams: A Survey of Society for the Study of Male Reproduction (SSMR) Members,” which she presented at the 2024 Sexual Medicine Society of North American Fall Scientific Meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona. Cahill is a urology resident at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.

Transcription:

Please provide an overview of this study and its notable findings.

For this study on chaperones, the motivation behind it was that we adopted a chaperone policy for genitourinary exams at our institution. We were curious what other policies there are outside of our institution and what other practitioners are doing. It's very relevant to this group of physicians, andrologists, and sexual medicine experts, because we have an increased need to do sensitive examinations. There are no formal guidelines on whether chaperone use is recommended or is mandatory, or anything like that. So we were interested to see, what is the practice variation across these specialists? Are they using chaperones? How are they finding that process and things like that? Chaperone use can provide for patient comfort as well as can help with medico-legal protection for physicians, but sometimes it comes at the cost of efficiency, so we also sought to look at that.

The way we did this was we had a survey that we sent to all members of the SSMR, and we asked them to fill out questions regarding their current practice patterns for use of chaperones. What we found is that only about a third of those we surveyed are using chaperones for genitourinary exams. Of those who do use chaperones and have a policy for this, most of them, about 70%, actually allow patients to choose if they would like a chaperone, which was surprising to us. They also had wide variation in terms of who can be a chaperone. Is it just a medical assistant? Is it a nurse? Can it be a medical student or a resident? It totally varied. How long does it take to find a chaperone? This really varied from less than a minute all the way up to 5 minutes. And then, how much time does it add to your visit, how easy it is, all of that kind of varied amongst who we had respond. The participants who did not have a chaperone policy, about a third of those said that they think it would be good to have a chaperone policy.

The main takeaways for us were that there's not a standardized practice right now in who uses chaperones and who can serve as a chaperone and how to incorporate that into your practice. I think, from our institution, we feel that it has been adopted pretty easily and with efficiency; however, it requires a lot of buy-in from staff, and requires a policy to be put in place so that it does function well.

This transcript was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.