Course: Cervical Cancer Screening Among Medicaid Patients During Natural Disasters and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Puerto Rico, 2016 to 2020
CME Credits: 1.00
Released: 2021-10-15
Puerto Rico (PR) has experienced multiple disasters in the last decade, including Hurricanes Irma and María (September 2017), a sequence of earthquakes (between December 2019 and January 2020), and the COVID-19 pandemic (starting in March 2020), all of which resulted in public health emergency declarations. In the aftermath of the hurricanes, PR residents experienced major disruptions in essential services for months, and the health care system was inoperable., The earthquakes led to island-wide power outages and school closings. Finally, on March 15, 2020, PR entered a COVID-19–related lockdown (executive order No. OE-2020-023) that continued until June 15, 2020 (executive order No. OE-2020-041). Quantifying cervical cancer screening disruptions is important in the context of rising cervical cancer incidence in PR. Therefore, we evaluated how the natural disasters and the pandemic factored into cervical cancer screening utilization in PR.
Educational Objective
To identify the key insights or developments described in this article
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