A recently conducted study has revealed that young women undergoing counseling about long term contraception might have fewer accidental pregnancies.
Studies conducted over the years have shown that progestin implants and intrauterine devices or IUDs can prevent pregnancy more effectively compared to the other more common contraceptive measures such as birth control pills and condoms. According to researchers conducting this new study, in spite of such high efficacy of the contraceptive implants, healthcare providers rarely mention them when speaking to patients. They said that this happens because the majority of these healthcare providers are not well acquainted with these long-term contraceptive methods.
Here, it must be mentioned that the new study has been conducted by a research team at the University of California, San Francisco in association with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Considering that around 50% of all pregnancies in the United States are accidental or unintended, the research team tried to find out whether training healthcare providers on the right ways of teaching young women about implants and IUDs would have an impact on the number of accidental pregnancies.
Cynthia Harper, study author and a professor of gynecology, obstetrics and reproductive sciences at the California University, said that young people in the United States rely heavily on condoms and birth control pills, but as forgetting to use these common contraceptive methods is easy, accidental pregnancies are pretty common among young women relying on them.
During the study, the research team monitored 40 Planned Parenthood centers in the US. They made healthcare providers at 50% of those centers undergo training on counseling woman about long-term contraception and inserting implants and IUDs. The healthcare providers at the remaining 50% centers kept on providing contraceptive care in a similar manner as before.
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Later, the researchers found that 71% of the healthcare providers representing the centers where the training sessions were conducted spoke to their patients about implants and IUDs; the share for the same was only 39% in the comparison group. In addition, in the centers receiving the training, 28% women aged between 18 and 25 years opted for implants or IUDs; in the comparison group, on the other hand, long-term contraception was accepted by only 17% of women of that age group.
What’s more, in the centers receiving the training, the rate of accidental pregnancies was only 8 per 100 women over a period of one year. During the same period, the rate of accidental pregnancies was 15 per 100 women in the other group.
