{"pk":13377,"title":"Patient and Community Organization Perspectives on  Accessing Social Resources from the Emergency Department: A Qualitative Study","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Introduction:\n Social risks adversely affect health and are associated with increased healthcare utilization and costs. Emergency department (ED) patients have high rates of social risk; however, little is known about best practices for ED-based screening or linkage to community resources. We examined the perspectives of patients and community organizations regarding social risk screening and linkage from the ED.\nMethods:\n Qualitative interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of ED patients and local community organization staff. Participants completed a brief demographic survey, health literacy assessment, and qualitative interview focused on barriers/facilitators to social risk screening in the ED, and ideas for screening and linkage interventions in the ED. Interviews were conducted in English or Spanish, recorded, transcribed, and coded. Themes were identified by consensus.\nResults: \nWe conducted 22 interviews with 16 patients and six community organization staff. Three categories of themes emerged. The first related to the importance of social risk screening in the ED. The second category encompassed challenges regarding screening and linkage, including fear, mistrust, transmission of accurate information, and time/resource constraints. The third category included suggestions for improvement and program development. Patients had varied preferences for verbal vs electronic strategies for screening. Community organization staff emphasized resource scarcity and multimodal communication strategies.\nConclusion:\n The development of flexible, multimodal, social risk screening tools, and the creation and maintenance of an accurate database of local resources, are strategies that may facilitate improved identification of social risk and successful linkage to available community resources.","language":"en","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0","short_name":"CC BY 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\r\n\r\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"},"keywords":[{"word":"emergency medicine, social determinants of health, qualitative"}],"section":"Population Health and Social Emergency Medicine","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7tk7m3hd","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Margaret","middle_name":"E.","last_name":"Samuels-Kalow","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Department of Emergency Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Melanie","middle_name":"F.","last_name":"Molina","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Department of Emergency Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Gia","middle_name":"E.","last_name":"Ciccolo","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Department of Emergency Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Alexa","middle_name":"","last_name":"Curt","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Department of Emergency Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Emily","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"Cleveland Manchanda","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Department of Emergency Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Nicole","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"de Paz","name_suffix":"","institution":"Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Division of General Pediatrics, Boston, Massachusetts","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Carlos","middle_name":"A.","last_name":"Camargo Jr.","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Department of Emergency Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2019-11-19T18:15:44Z","date_accepted":"2019-11-19T18:15:44Z","date_published":"2020-06-24T18:13:18Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/westjem/article/13377/galley/7022/download/"}]}