Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Jun 19, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 12, 2024 - Sep 6, 2024
Date Accepted: Jan 5, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
User-Centered Design of a Health Professional Mentorship Platform to Improve Equitable Access to Abortion
ABSTRACT
Background:
Access to safe abortion care is a reproductive right for all individuals across Canada. Underserved populations are over-represented among those with unintended pregnancies and particularly those seeking abortion. Yet, few resources exist to help healthcare and allied helping professionals provide culturally competent, and gender-affirming abortion care for underserved populations.
Objective:
This project aimed to redesign and adapt an existing subscription-based medication abortion mentorship platform into a culturally appropriate and gender-affirming open-access website of curated health professional resources to promote equitable, accessible, high-quality abortion care, particularly for underserved populations
Methods:
We drew on a user-centered design framework to redesign the web platform in five iterative phases. Healthcare and allied helping professionals were engaged in each stage of the development process including the initial design of the platform, curation of the resources, reviewing the content, and evaluation of the wireframes and the end product.
Results:
This project resulted in an open-access bilingual (English and French) online platform containing comprehensive information and resources on abortion care for healthcare providers (physicians, nurse practitioners, and pharmacists) and allied helping professionals (midwives, medical officers, community workers, and social workers). The website incorporated information on clinical, logistical, and administrative guidance, including culturally competent and gender-affirming toolkits that could equip healthcare professionals with the requisite knowledge to provide abortion care for underserved populations.
Conclusions:
This platform contains resources that can increase the competencies of healthcare professionals to initiate and sustain culturally and contextually appropriate abortion care for underserved groups while clarifying myths and misconceptions that often militate against initiating abortion. Our resource also has the potential to support equitable access to high-quality abortion care, particularly for those among underserved populations who may have the greatest unmet need for abortion services yet face the greatest barriers to access to care
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.