Jan. 2010
Vol. 2, #1

Happy New Year!

And welcome to the second issue of the Primary Care Initiative (PCI)/Health Workforce Pilot Project (HWPP) newsletter! If you missed the first one, it’s still online if you want to catch up. Meanwhile, here is the news since then:

	HWPP Trainee and Research Coordinator Meeting
	Providing Abortion Care: A Professional Toolkit
	HWPP materials on ansirh.org
	Opt-out summary
	HWPP Project site visits
	Kaiser Permanente of Northern California starting training

HWPP Trainee and Research Coordinator Meeting

Twenty four HWPP project trainees and four research coordinators met in Oakland on November 2, 2009 for a day-long meeting to share program information, updates on curriculum, and the latest evaluation data—and to celebrate their work as abortion providers. If you weren’t able to attend, please call and we would be happy to let you know about anything you missed. This inaugural meeting was such a success that we hope to hold these meetings annually, so please join us next year! In the meantime, you can participate vicariously in the meeting through our online summary.

Providing Abortion Care:
A Professional Toolkit

The long-awaited APC Toolkit: Providing Abortion Care: A Professional Toolkit for Nurse-Midwives, Nurse Practitioners, and Physician Assistants is now out. It informs, supports, and catalyzes efforts to promote the provision of abortion by certified nurse-midwives, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants. The toolkit is available online in both a web-based and pdf format. In addition, we will be sending each trainee and coordinator a CD copy and look forward to your feedback. Read more...

Along with the Toolkit, ANSIRH’s Primary Care Initiative has also completed three issue briefs, which are short handouts on:

Please feel free to print and distribute both the Toolkit and the ANSIRH issue briefs.

HWPP materials on ansirh.org

We have created a secure area on our website for trainers, trainees and research coordinators to share HWPP-related reading materials, research updates, and frequently asked questions. You can access it simply by going to the website and logging in. We’ll be sending you an assigned user name and password for your first entry to the site, and you’ll then be able to personalize your password for any subsequent visits.

We are hoping this will be a useful tool for communicating with our partner organizations and keeping all of you up to date. Current plans are to provide didactic information for trainees, forms and research protocols for research coordinators, and tips and frequently asked questions from all clinic sites. Let us know what else you would like to see posted on the site.

Opt-out summary

Over 75% of our patient population consent to be seen by an advanced practice nurse or physician assistant during their visit to one of our partner sites. But some women prefer to be seen by a physician, and there has been speculation among our sites about why. To answer this question, one of our partner sites asked 306 patients who declined APC provision in 2008 and 2009 (in favor of an MD-provided procedure) to specify the reasons for their choice.

The data on the pie chart show a snapshot of the reasons patients choose MD provision. The majority of patients (60%) who decline APC provision feel the procedure will be “safer” with an MD. Another quarter (22%) say that they just feel “more comfortable” with an MD, 12% are “too nervous,” and a small percentage (6%) believe that the MD has more experience. 

While most patients are comfortable with APC providers, our results suggest a need—and an opportunity—to educate patients on the extent of APC education and experience in women’s health care.

HWPP Project site visits

The Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD), that oversees the Health Workforce Pilot Project Program and that grants us the waiver that enables our project to operate, hold annual site visits at all our Partner Organizations. The site visits are scheduled as follows:

We will let you know how the site visits went in the next newsletter!

Kaiser Permanente of Northern California starting training

We are all very excited that Kaiser Permanente of Northern California is now a research site and partner organization in the HWPP Project. They have one trainee in practice, integrating her aspiration abortion skills into her practice at KPNC’s Richmond clinic. A second trainee began training last month. Welcome Kaiser!

Editor: Shauna Nyborg, Project Assistant, Health Workforce Pilot Project (HWPP). ©2010 ANSIRH. Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health—ANSIRH—works to ensure that reproductive health care and policy are grounded in evidence. ANSIRH’s multi-disciplinary team includes clinicians, researchers and scholars in the fields of sociology, demography, anthropology, medicine, nursing, public health, and law. ANSIRH is a program of the Bixby Center for Reproductive Health. Photo ©2009 Jana Carrey Photography.