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![]() 184463 Women's perspectives on family planning services: Findings from a qualitative studyWednesday, October 29, 2008: 11:10 AM
Despite substantial research in the US documenting problems with health care quality and differences in the quality of care received by patients of different racial, ethnic, and language backgrounds, there has been limited attention to these topics in family planning. In this qualitative study, we carried out 40 in-depth interviews with adult women who were recent family planning clients to learn more about their family planning service experiences. We recruited women from two publicly funded family planning clinics in Northern California. Women were eligible to participate if they were African-American, White, or Latina, aged 18 to 35, spoke English or Spanish, and reported at least two family planning visits in the previous 10 years. We analyzed our data by coding our transcripts thematically.
We found women evaluated the quality of their family planning care considering nine factors: the information provided; whether their autonomy was respected; service accessibility; how well providers engaged with them and personalized care; how caring and empathetic providers seemed; attention paid to their comfort; technical quality; service organization, and finally, whether their service needs were met. There were few differences by race, ethnicity, or language in the factors women considered important when receiving care, however, for Spanish-speaking Latinas, receiving language appropriate services was critical. Many of the issues we identified as important to women have rarely been measured in past family planning service quality assessments. Our findings can inform the development of better measures of family planning service quality and can inform service quality improvement efforts.
Learning Objectives: Keywords: Quality of Care, Family Planning
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I carried out this research as part of my PhD. I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.
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