Week 9 post

Week 9 post

by Chris Ahlbach -
Number of replies: 1

1. I’m currently working on an analysis of factors associated with pharmacy administered, unsafe abortion attempts in Nepal among women who are presenting for abortion care. We’ve found that living in a rural location (measured by proxy by travel time to the clinic in hours), declaring that having low finances made it difficult to access the clinic, and one specific caste are all associated with the outcome while controlling for appropriate confounders. I think this is a combination of first- and second-generation work because the first part of the analytic goals is descriptive, to understand the prevalence of unsafe abortion attempts among a national sample of women presenting for abortion care, and the second analytic goal is more along the 2nd generation-to understand why certain groups are at higher risk for this compared to others. Identifying barriers such as travel time could lead to an intervention of such as taxi vouchers to assist people getting to safe and legal clinics for abortion care. Another possible intervention would be training pharmacists to safely administer medication abortion and look if this reduces or changes disparities in unsafe medication abortion prevalence.

2. I can imagine an intervention based upon the above findings with a travel voucher given to people who live in rural areas when they test positive for a pregnancy, that would pay for a taxi ride to an abortion clinic. This would be directly engaging with social determinants in providing an intervention that eliminates the SDH of socioeconomic status. I think this would be more similar to the barbershop example, engaging people who are prone to a negative health outcome due to social determinants, but in this case it would directly address the social determinant of SES.


In reply to Chris Ahlbach

Re: Week 9 post

by Jerrine Morris -
Hi Chris,

I enjoyed your intervention about providing a travel voucher for individuals who live in rural areas. There are areas of access work that can be overcome by improving knowledge, insurance access, and increasing the number of providers for patients to see. There, however, are shear limitations geographically that may pose greater challenges to overcome. With use of a travel voucher this can directly engage with the social determinants and alleviate some burden seen in accessing abortions.