medicine

  • Authorization/certification of abortion: Health care professionals other than doctors should be permitted to sign off abortions for patients they are caring for.
  • Integration of abortion provision into routine health care: Abortion provision could beneficially be integrated into—given levels of support revealed in the study—in community sexual and reproductive health services with adequate resources and appropriate commissioning.
  • Extension of roles: Appropriately trained nurses and midwives should be allowed to prescribe abortion medication and perform vacuum aspiration in the context of abortion provision as they already do in miscarriage care which needs identical procedures and treatments.
  • Provision of training: attention is needed to provision of both undergraduate training and professional education to increase knowledge and awareness and to equip new cadres of health care professionals to contribute to abortion care and support.
  • Patient choice: Women seeking abortion should, where possible, be offered options in terms of where they have their abortion, which procedure to have, and how they receive care and support (eg. remotely by telemedicine or in person in the case of medical abortion), and choice of surgical procedure if preferred).
  • Patient support: Interventions to improve abortion care should be clearly positioned across the patient journey, e.g. to support decision-making about where and how, to manage expectations and pain relief, and to facilitate contraceptive care.

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