Nathan Hale, Director of Research in East Tennessee State University College of Public Health’s Center for Applied Research and Evaluation (CARE) in Women’s Health, is lead author of an article in Contraception. The article, “Contraceptive Counseling, Method Satisfaction, and Planned Method Continuation among Women in the U.S. Southeast” represents the first study of its kind to examine the quality of contraceptive counseling in the US South and how counseling influences key reproductive health outcomes for women of reproductive age.
Amal Khoury, director of CARE Women’s Health, stated, “This is the first population-level study documenting women’s experiences with contraceptive counseling in the southeast and utilizing mediation analysis to specify the paths through which counseling influences outcomes.”
Contraception is a leading journal in the field of reproductive health. Michael Smith and Amal Khoury of CARE Women’s Health as well as College of Public Health alumna Paezha McCartt are co-authors. Members of the University of California at San Francisco and University of Kentucky are additional co-authors.
The study uses the validated Person-Centered Contraceptive Counseling (PCCC) scale to examine experiences with counseling and associations between counseling quality, contraceptive method satisfaction, and planned method continuation at the population level in two southeastern states. It utilized data from the Statewide Survey of Women, a probability-based sample of reproductive-aged women in Alabama and South Carolina in 2017/18. The authors included 1,265 women using a contraceptive method and reporting a contraceptive visit in the past year. Respondents rated their most recent provider experience across four PCCC items. About half (54%) of participants reported optimal contraceptive counseling.
The article notes counseling quality is independently associated with method satisfaction at the population level. The effect of counseling on planned method continuation is partially mediated by method satisfaction. Interventions to support person-centered contraceptive counseling promise to improve quality of care, patient experience with care, and reproductive outcomes.
“By leveraging a novel source of data (Statewide Survey of Women) and applying a unique modeling approach,” noted Dr. Hale, “We documented both prevalence of optimal counseling and its impact while providing evidence to support public health interventions aimed at improving counseling quality.”