Accuracy and Acceptance of a Self-Collection Model for Respiratory Tract Infection Diagnostics: A Concise Clinical Literature Review

Abstract

BackgroundNurses are the primary clinicians who collect specimens for respiratory tract infection testing. The specimen collection procedure is time and resource-consuming, but more importantly, it places nurses at risk for potential infection. The practice of allowing patients to self-collect their diagnostic specimens may provide an alternative testing model for the current COVID-19 outbreaks. The objective of this paper was to evaluate the accuracy and patient perception of self-collected specimens for respiratory tract infection diagnostics. MethodsA concise clinical review of the recently published literature was conducted. ResultsA total of 11 articles were included the review synthesis. The concept of self-collected specimens has a high patient acceptance rate of 83-99%. Self-collected nasal-swab specimens demonstrated strong diagnostic fidelity for respiratory tract infections with a sensitivity between 80-100%, this is higher than the 76% sensitivity observed with self-collected throat specimens. In a comparative study evaluating a professionally collected to a self-collected specimen for COVID-19 testing, a high degree of agreement (k = 0.89) was observed between the two methods. ConclusionAs we continue to explore for testing models to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, self-collected specimens is a practical alternative to nurse specimen collection.