What’s required for incorporating chaperone use in genitourinary exams

Author(s):

Key Takeaways

Chaperones in genitourinary exams balance patient comfort with practice efficiency, requiring strategic planning and adequate staffing.
Successful integration of chaperones depends on clear practice patterns and staff buy-in to maintain workflow efficiency.
Yale's experience demonstrates that with sufficient staff, chaperone policies can be implemented without significantly impacting visit duration.

"I think it requires the adequate staff, and then also the development of a practice pattern for how chaperones are used," says Ellen Cahill, MD.

In this video, Ellen Cahill, MD, discusses the use of chaperones for genitourinary exams. She presented the study “The Use of Chaperones for Genitourinary Exams: A Survey of Society for the Study of Male Reproduction (SSMR) Members,” 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:

Although some respondents reported that chaperones added minimal time to visits, others indicated that it could be more time-consuming. How can practices balance the need for patient comfort and protection with the goal of maintaining efficiency?

Efficiency is hugely important, and anything that we add to our practice, we do have to make sure it's not inconvenient to us. I think it requires the adequate staff, and then also the development of a practice pattern for how chaperones are used. You need enough people to serve as your chaperones around. You don't want to be looking out into the hallway and you don't see anybody. You need to know who's going to serve as your chaperone. Is it going to be the techs, the nurses? It kind of depends on the practice setting. And then you need buy-in from all the staff to make sure that you understand how it's going to impact your workflow. Is it that they're going to room the patient, you're going to see the patient, and then you're going to make sure you have somebody outside of the room ready to go for the chaperone portion of the exam? How long are they going to spend with you, and making sure it doesn't interfere with them being able to room your next patient? I think at Yale, it's actually been able to be incorporated pretty well. We have another abstract here from my co -resident, Dr Sharath Reddy, who surveyed Yale urologists specifically, and most of our physicians felt that the policy worked out well for them and was quite efficient. We do have a lot of staff, so we just have to make sure that we always have somebody available. And typically we do, it doesn't add much time to the visit.

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