By Cati Brown-Johnson, Sonia Rose Harris & Lisa Goldthwaite In the February issue of the Journal, Hofmeyr and colleagues describe a postpartum family planning quality improvement initiative in a large public hospital in Botswana. Their initiative aimed to improve postpartum contraceptive counseling and provision, particularly efforts to integrate intrauterine device services into clinical practice while […]
Category: Guidelines
AGREE II is an agreeable, accessible tool to assess the quality of trans and gender minority clinical practice guidelines
By Sara Dahlen, Dean Connolly, Isra Arif, Muhammad Hyder Junejo, Susan Bewley and Catherine Meads Doctors trying to help their patients are bombarded with too much and often conflicting information. Well-developed clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) can help busy practitioners ground their real-world frontline care in properly considered, best available knowledge gained from high quality research. […]
How to include the perspectives of women living with HIV in research
By Florence Anam1, Cecilia Chung2, Teresia Otieno3, Martha Tholanah4, Alice Welbourn5 As the 23rd international AIDS conference nears, we reflect once more on what it takes to ensure that issues facing women living with HIV are adequately addressed, especially in the context of COVID-19 and increased rates of domestic violence globally. We know how violence […]
Should we all be wearing masks? A community midwife’s view.
by Laura Tugores & Octavia Wiseman During the Covid19 pandemic midwives and other front-line workers challenged PHE’s guidelines which said that Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) was not needed when caring for asymptomatic patients. In this blog post, two community midwives talk about what this was like for them. Now that guidance has finally been changed […]
Normalising abortion: How do we get there?
By Carrie Purcell1, Fiona Bloomer2, Lesley Hoggart3, Karen Maxwell1, Sam Rowlands4 The COVID-19 pandemic, and current ‘lockdown’ situation in the UK, have seen unprecedentedly fast-paced reorganisation of healthcare services, with many exploring the potential offered by telemedicine. Until this week, abortion care seemed to be an exception to this, with women still being legally required […]
Ensuring personalised care for pregnant women during COVID-19
During a period of lockdown where many of our basic freedoms have been limited, the autonomy and safety of pregnant women can easily be overlooked. In a blogpost last week, Anna Nelson and Chloe Romanis discussed concerns raised about the availability of home birthing during the COVID-19 lockdown. I spoke with Sarah Noble, Head of […]
Home-Birthing and Free-Birthing in the era of COVID-19
Anna Nelson and Elizabeth Chloe Romanis For many pregnant people[1] due to give birth soon there is considerable anxiety about how COVID-19 will impact birthing plans. Those who have planned for home-births are concerned that their plans will be jeopardised by the announcements from some NHS Trusts that they are suspending home-birthing services. Private home-birth […]
Abortion and Covid-19: MPs should beware anti-abortion letters
Nathan Hodson, Elizabeth Chloe Romanis and Jordan Parsons Debate continues this week over whether abortion regulations in Great Britain should be adapted to ensure access for women during the Covid-19 crisis and resulting widespread self-isolation. We have reviewed an email circulated by anti-abortion activists immediately after laws were briefly relaxed (and the changes were revoked […]
Reproductive Health is a Public Health Issue
By Dr Sue Mann. Re-published with permission of FSRH. Dr Sue Mann and colleagues Monica Davison and Alison Hadley provide some background to the new suite of documents on reproductive health to be published by Public Health England (PHE). The documents will define the scope of reproductive health, provide a national overview of the current status […]
Women Suffer Most from Cuts to 17 NHS Operations
By Katherine Ripullone and Kate Womersley From 2019, the NHS will refuse hundreds of thousands of operations, as part of cost-cutting measures. What’s been less well publicized than the ‘17 blacklisted ops’, is how restriction and discontinuation of these procedures by NHS England will disproportionately affect women. This gender bias is not a new trend. […]