• Thang T Nguyen, Wesley G Zeger, Michael C Wadman, and Aaron N Barksdale.
• J Emerg Nurs. 2021 Sep 1; 47 (5): 798-806.

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.Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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