News & Events
National Chlamydia Screening: Data Capture Challenge
"Sexual Health is one of the top priorities for Brent & Harrow PCT and Chlamydia is the UK's most prevalent sexually transmitted disease. We need to screen at least 10% of the entire population of 16-24 year olds for this programme to be viable. Formic software provides the resource that we need to achieve this."
Florence Acquah,
Chlamydia Screening Co-ordinator, Brent & Harrow PCT
The Department of Health published "The National Strategy for Sexual Health and HIV" in July 2001, sighting the increase rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), number of people living with HIV and high rate of unintended pregnancies as evidence of a need to re-examine traditional approaches, to prevent ill health and treat problems once they arise.
The National Chlamydia Screening Program (NCSP) is one part of this strategy and its planned rollout places further demand on resource-limited PCTs that will need to undertake high volume screening to achieve the highest reductions in Chlamydia prevalence. Brent & Harrow, Hounslow, Ealing and Kensington & Chelsea PCTs are all using Formic software to automatically capture patient data from screening forms.
Florence Acquah, Chlamydia Screening Co-ordinator at Brent & Harrow PCT explains, "The great thing about Formic is that we don't need to manually input the data - which is a real headache."
Florence expands on her experience as a user, "The Formic system allows you to capture any information you want by simply re-designing the standard screening template. You can also examine mistakes and make corrections so that the information collected is accurate. All in all, it's a very flexible tool."