Impact of COVID-19 on access to sexual health clinics for patients 18 years old and under

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic our clinic offered telephone triage and booked appointments if required to all patients. The dedicated young person's walk-in clinic was temporarily suspended. These changes raised concerns regarding access for vulnerable patients especially under 18s. To assess the impact of these changes in access and the impact of the pandemic on young and vulnerable patients, we reviewed the number of cases discussed at monthly local safeguarding (SG) meetings between March 2020 -February 2021 and compared with pre-pandemic data (March 2019 -February 2020). Method: EPR was used to access departmental SG meetings data between March 2019 and February 2021. Results: 226 SG cases were discussed from March 2020 to February 2021 compared with 196 the previous year. This includes some patients who required multiple discussions. 99 (44%) patients between March 2020 -February 2021 were over 18 years compared with 73 (37%) patients from the previous year. 25 (11%) patients from March 2020 -February 2021 were male compared with 28 (14%) from the previous year. Table 1 shows the breakdown of patient age ranges. When excluding repeated discussions, the total number of patients is shown in Table 2. Conclusion: Safeguarding discussions increased despite fewer patients attending clinic. There were an increased number of patients requiring multiple SG discussions during the pandemic. This indicates that more complex cases were seen in 2020 (examples will be presented) this maybe as a result of unintended consequences of lockdown and pandemic management. This data demonstrates that our current clinic model allows us to identify and engage with vulnerable patients although it is clear that not all vulnerable and young patients have presented to services during the pandemic. (Table Presented).