Background: Integrating family planning into postabortion and postpartum services can increase contraceptive use and decrease maternal and child death; however, little information exists on the monitoring and evaluation of such programs. This article draws on research completed by the EngenderHealth's AgirPF project in three urban areas of Togo on the extent to which monitoring and evaluation systems of health services, which operated within the AgirPF project area in Togo, captured integrated family planning services.
Methods: This mixed methods case study used 25 health facility assessments with health service record review in hospitals, large community clinics, a dispensary, and private clinics and 41 key informant interviews with health faculty, individuals working at reproductive health organizations, individuals involved in reproductive health policy and politics, health care workers, and health facility directors.
Results: The study found the reporting system for health care was labor intensive and involved multiple steps for health care workers. The system lacked a standardized method to record family planning services as part of other health care at the patient level, yet the Ministry of Health required integrated family planning services to be reported on district and partner organization reporting forms. Key informants suggested improving the system by using computer-based monitoring, streamlining the reporting process to include all necessary information at the patient level, and standardizing what information is needed for the Ministry of Health and partner organizations.
Conclusion: Future research should focus on assessing the best methods for recording integrated health services and task shifting of reporting. Recommendations for future policy and programming include consolidating data for reproductive health indicators, ensuring type of information needed is captured at all levels, and reducing provider workload for reporting.
Aim: This education-focused study examined changes in nursing students' knowledge and attitudes towards responding to opioid-involved overdoses following participation in trainings delivered using remote learning modalities. Design: This pre-post study examined learning outcomes among 17 nursing students. Methods: Participants completed the Opioid Overdose Attitude Scale and Opioid Overdose Knowledge Scale to assess attitudes and knowledge, respectively. Trainings were delivered to two separate groups, one via virtual reality immersive video and another over video conferencing. Results: Attitude scores increased by an average of 12.2 points and knowledge scores increased by 1.65 points. Within the virtual reality group, attitude scores increased by an average of 10 points, while no significant changes were observed in knowledge scores. The video conferencing group improved in both attitude and knowledge scores, by an average of 16.2 points and 2.1 points, respectively. Conclusions: These hypothesis generating results illustrate the utility of remote learning approaches to deliver trainings, while maintaining social distance during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The President's Corner article by Dr. Alison Stuebe entitled “We Need Patient-Centered Research in Breastfeeding Medicine” shines a light on the need for increased health care provider awareness, education, and empathy in clinical cases wherein exclusive breastfeeding is not able to be achieved.1 For lactating parents experiencing chronic lactation insufficiency—here defined as the production of less milk than is required to exclusively feed an infant for the duration of the breastfeeding relationship, despite following best practices—issues around health care provider awareness, along with a lack of evidence-based solutions, often lead only to increased frustration during an already fraught time for parents' physical and mental well-being.