Building community capacity to support reproductive health education for women with intellectual and developmental disabilities

A statewide survey of adult consumers with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) revealed rates of annual clinical breast exams, mammograms, and pap smears among women age 40 and older were below Healthy People 2010 objectives. Prior evaluation of a group-based health promotion intervention, facilitated by disability providers, showed increased knowledge of health care procedures among women with I/DD. Building on this work, we hypothesized that increased involvement of clinic-based sexuality health educators would improve knowledge gains, screening rates, and program sustainability. We partnered with nine statewide agencies to address curriculum weaknesses and develop strategies to implement workshops in five major regions of the state. We then supported a full-day workshop resulting in 15 master trainers including sexuality health educators, disability providers, and public health professionals who could form local planning committees statewide. Pre-training evaluations showed 18.2% of facilitators agreed they knew how to prepare a woman with I/DD for a pelvic exam, whereas 100% of facilitators agreed after the master training. Fifty percent of facilitators agreed they knew techniques to reduce anxiety about medical visits at pre-training, and 100% of facilitators agreed they knew techniques at post-training. There was an increase (70%) in the number of facilitators at post-training who agreed they knew how to prepare women with I/DD to be active participants in their healthcare. In the eight months following the master training, facilitators planned five workshops. We will describe our community capacity building strategies, master training outcome data, and consumer evaluations from five health promotion workshops.