Research & other work

Primary Care Initiative

Dr. Diana Taylor, Primary Care Initiative Director of Research and Evaluation (left) and Molly Battistelli, Director of the Health Workforce Pilot Project (HWPP), one component of the Initiative.

The Primary Care Initiative (PCI) seeks to inform policy changes that allow a broad range of clinicians to provide first-trimester aspiration abortion as a component of primary health care. The Initiative activities focus specifically on “advanced practice clinicians” or APCs, a shorthand phrase used to include nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives and physician assistants, as providers of abortion care.

The long-term goal of the Initiative is to integrate early abortion provision within women's primary health care. The Primary Care Initiative includes a variety of multidisciplinary projects focused on health workforce development, including:

The HWPP Project—a training and evaluation project for nurse practitioners, nurse midwives and physician assistants in early aspiration abortion
The APC Toolkit—Providing Abortion Care: A Professional Toolkit for Nurse-Midwives, Nurse Practitioners, and Physician Assistants—is a professional guide for clinicians who would like to provide abortion care, and for the advocates who support them
APCs: Advancing Access to Abortion—development of materials examining some of the myriad legal, clinical and educational issues that affect and frame the provision of abortion by advanced practice clinicians
The development of standards of care and clinical competencies to ensure adequate training requirements for primary care clinicians as abortion providers
Analysis of the state laws and regulations that govern abortion provision and the health professions

Download the PCI fact sheet.
Learn more about advanced practice clinicians (APCs).
Read our issue briefs.

Completed work in this Initiative: Early Abortion Project

The Early Abortion Project sought to increase access to early abortion services by addressing barriers that prevent providers from offering abortion services. Project efforts focused on four areas:

Consensus building, dissemination of information, and promotion of evidence-based abortion practice
Economic analysis and health care systems improvement
Physician and advanced practice clinical training
Research to improve and expand abortion services

A consensus monograph, which describes options for management of the termination of early pregnancy, was distributed to over 40,000 health care providers (Early Medical Abortion: Issues for Practice; also available in Spanish). ANSIRH’s Early Abortion Training Workbook was also made available online. Studies of the economics of abortion provision included an analysis of the cost to providers of offering medication abortion services and a study of out-of-pocket costs to women undergoing a medication abortion. A model insurance coverage policy and a detailed analysis of malpractice coverage of medication abortion were also produced as components of this project.

For more information on the Initiative, contact Pat Anderson, MPH.

See the new Toolkit for resources on APC provision of abortion.