Project Justification: Every year tens of thousands of women refugees arrive in the US yet little is known about the reproductive health and family planning needs of these women after third country resettlement. Refugee women arrive to the United States with significant trauma histories, substantial accrued debt, and untreated medical conditions. Preliminary results from the qualitative strand of my primary fellowship project indicate poor understanding of modern family planning methods among resettled African refugee women in the Salt Lake Valley and low contraceptive utilization despite a strong desire for utilization of modern and highly effective reversible contraceptive methods to control fertility.
Major barriers to modern family planning utilization identified by resettled African refugee women include variability of adequate interpretation and financial concerns. This project will randomize African refugee women residing in the Salt Lake Valley to group contraceptive counseling (GCC), based on the centering model of prenatal care, or to standard individual contraceptive counseling (ICC). Group prenatal care (GPNC) has demonstrated efficacy at improving individual health outcomes and health behaviors among diverse groups of women including low-income and non-English speaking populations (1-4). This proposal will evaluate whether group models of care have similar benefits when used for contraceptive counseling.
Proposed Research: This will be a randomized controlled trial of group versus individual contraceptive counseling.
New Features: This novel research moves an established and effective model of prenatal care delivery into the realm of family planning and gynecology care.
Anticipated Problems: Potential problems anticipated with this project include recruiting community participants and interpreter issues.