Cervical screening for people experiencing homelessness, addiction, or mental illness

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 67, No. 2, March 2025, Page 47 Letters
By: Ralph Jones, MD

I read with great interest two articles in the December 2024 BCMJ regarding cervical screening, in particular screening in populations that experience challenges. I appreciated the outstanding and culturally sensitive work with First Nations and Métis communities [BCMJ 2024;66:370-374].

I work with people experiencing homelessness, addiction, and mental illness. This work is via health authority clinics. I have long been aware of the possibility of simpler acceptable means of screening using human papillomavirus swabs. The problem is that when managers or staff show interest in this option, they often move on to other positions. It is difficult to elevate this issue to a level where an executive will take responsibility and introduce the screening at all our clinics.

There are added difficulties in helping people who have no address or email access and are disabled to the extent that they cannot reliably take part or follow up unless they are helped to do so. I hope someone reading this letter will take notice and persuade health authority support services to, as the movie says, “do the right thing.”
—Ralph Jones, MD
Chilliwack

This letter was submitted in response to “Cervical screening in BC—Change inspired by First Nations and Métis communities.”

hidden

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Ralph Jones, MD. Cervical screening for people experiencing homelessness, addiction, or mental illness. BCMJ, Vol. 67, No. 2, March, 2025, Page(s) 47 - Letters.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply