Screening for hepatitis C in urgent and emergency units: a systematic review

Objective: Identifying studies that performed screening for hepatitis C and that also assessed the virus prevalence in urgency and emergency unit users. Method: A systematic review performed on the LILACS, MEDLINE databases via PubMed, SciELO and Virtual Health Library. Results: After careful search and analysis, 19 publications were part of the results, in compliance with the pre-defined criteria. Publication dates were concentrated between 1992 and 2018. The main journal to publish such articles was the Annals of Emergency Medicine (26.31%). Regarding the origin of publications, the following stand out: United States (63.15%), Europe (31.57%), and Asia (5.28%). Regarding prevalence, in the United States, a variation between 1.4% to 18% was observed. In Europe, in turn, the prevalence ranged from 0 to 5%. In the Asian study, the prevalence was 1.8%. Conclusion: The screening performed in urgent and emergency units proved to be efficient in identifying new cases, especially when associated with the age factor, which proves to be superior to the strategy based only on risk factors. Thus, for greater effectiveness, the association of three strategies is recommended: screening location, age group, and risk factors.