Bridging the Gap: A Contraception Counseling Workshop for Healthcare Professionals

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Background: Unintended pregnancy is a major public health issue in the United States. Physicians and allied health professionals play a principal role in providing current, accurate, and unbiased reproductive health information. The Medical Students for Choice chapter leadership at Touro University-California identified the public health implications of accessible contraception, the discussion of all-current contraceptive methods, and effective contraception options counseling as gaps in the current curriculum. This paper describes the process of creating, implementing, and evaluating a collaborative, hands-on contraception workshop conducted in order to address these deficits. Methods: Forty-two students from the osteopathic medicine, physician assistant, and public health programs attended the workshop. All attendees agreed to participate in pre- and post-intervention evaluation, which assessed changes in knowledge and attitude as well as collected acceptability information. Results: This workshop achieved its goal of increasing knowledge about contraception and contraception options counseling. While attitudes about the importance of contraception information in curriculum and the likelihood of using contraception options counseling skills in the future did not significantly change, they were high to start with and they trended in a positive direction. Conclusions: This workshop has the potential to inform the development of similar contraception workshops in medical or allied health profession programs with similar curricular deficits. Improved training preclinical contraception training has the potential to optimize women's contraception counseling experiences and help reduce the high number of unintended pregnancies in the United States.