Publikation

Ready-To-Go Questionnaire - Development and validation of a novel medical pre-travel risk stratification tool

Wissenschaftlicher Artikel/Review - 05.05.2022

Bereiche
Schlagwörter (Tags)
Travel Medicine, Risk Assessment
PubMed
DOI
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Zitation
Gazzotti A, De Crom-Beer S, Haller S, Hasler T, Anagnostopoulos A, Hatz C, Fehr J. Ready-To-Go Questionnaire - Development and validation of a novel medical pre-travel risk stratification tool. Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease 2022; 47
Art
Wissenschaftlicher Artikel/Review (Englisch)
Zeitschrift
Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease 2022; 47
Veröffentlichungsdatum
05.05.2022
Kurzbeschreibung/Zielsetzung

Background
There are no validated pre-travel self-assessment tools to stratify travellers' health risks and identify their needs for pre-travel medical preparation. This study presents a novel pre-travel risk stratification tool (Ready-To-Go Questionnaire).

Methods
The Ready-To-Go Questionnaire was developed by travel medical experts. It assesses information on travellers' itinerary and current health status, thereby assigning travellers to one out of four risk categories. To explore the Ready-To-Go Questionnaire's validity, we analysed the agreement between the risk categories resulting from the questionnaire and predefined validation criteria. This study was carried out at the Travel Clinic, University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Results
One hundred travellers attending a pre-travel consultation were included. 82% corresponded to the substantial-risk category, 17% to the high-risk category, 1% to the moderate-risk category and 0% to the low-risk category. The concordance between the risk categories and the consultants' risk assessment, was 0.39 and 0.29 (unweighted/weighted Cohen's Kappa). No significant concordance was found between the risk categories and additional validation criteria.

Conclusion
The Ready-To-Go Questionnaire is a medical triage tool developed to identify different levels of travel-related health risks. This tool assists in better understanding travellers' needs, shaping modern travel consultations and offering patient-centred travel medicine services.