Reproductive Life Planning: Accessing the Utility of a tailored Workbook

Background: In efforts to comply with CDC’s recommendations to improve preconception health, evidence-based tools to help women think about their own reproductive health needs and goals, and how to have a good conversation with their health care providers, are essential. In response we developed a reproductive life planning self-help workbook designed to help women assess their own reproductive goals and associated health care needs.

Intervention: The workbook is tailored for women across the lifespan with different reproductive goals: (1) unable to have children; (2) do not want any (more) children; (3) would (more) children, but not now; and (4) want to get pregnant now. Women identify their own goal and then complete the part of the workbook tailored to that goal.

Methods: Two focus groups and self-administered satisfaction surveys were conducted with primarily minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged adult women in North Carolina. Frequencies of participants’ demographics, satisfaction, and utility of the workbook were computed in SPSS, while qualitative data were managed in Atlas ti 6.2.

Results: The data revealed overall satisfaction with the workbook. The majority of women, “strongly agreed” that the workbook encouraged them to talk with their doctor and would make this conversation easier. Areas for improvement were discussed.

Conclusion: Results suggest that the self-help workbook could be an effective tool in empowering adult women to have a good conversation with their doctors about their reproductive health. This workbook has great potential as supplemental material for health care providers in assisting the delivery of reproductive/preconception health care.