Reproductive Health

The Health Collective - Wellbeing of WomenOur new initiative aims to ensure that the women’s health strategy meets the needs of all women.

We have joined the Wellbeing of Women Health Collective.

Ethnic minority women's views about contraception - public engagement report Nov 2022This report presents the first part of our research project, which explores women's experiences from ethnic minority groups. The report was co-written with those who attended the workshop. The discussions have led to our current research project with our community link research workers.

We are proud to share the first output from out current project looking at contraception access and experience.

We wrote the report as a team including some of the women who attended the workshop. Their contribution was very much appreciated.

We also have shared images creayed by our visual scribe team at Nifty Fox.

Click on the report to read it in full.

Understanding access to Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare in the General Practice setting; A focus on inequalityThis report gives an overview of sexual and reproductive health inequalities using the Candidacy Framework to understand access. Sheffield University Ethics Project code148174

Our latest update from Dr Rebecca Mawson.

Looking at the challenges of accessing sexual and reproductive care, this includes a range of different things like contraception, sexual health screening, LGBTQ+ care and much more.

Click the image to see the full report.

Any questions or views you want to share, feel free to contact via r.l.mawson@sheffield.ac.uk

Patient and public consultation

17th November, 2022. GP researchers Dr. Rebecca L. Mawson and Dr. Emma Linton had an opportunity to directly hear from women of diverse backgrounds about their views on contraceptives. The discussion highlighted issues related to access and delivery of contraception services, as well as those that are socio-cultural and historical.

"Thank you to the organisers. It was a good, insightful and educational event. I learnt a lot. Hopefully, I am going to start the conversation in my community to get their views" (PPI member).

Opinions about contraception amongst ethnic minority populations.

Funded by the Royal College of General Practitioners, Scientific Foundation Board.

Providing women with choices about contraception improves their health and the health of any children they have. We know that women from ethnic minorities can find it more difficult to access contraceptive services in the UK but we do not know why this is. There is not much research looking into what women from ethnic minorities think of different contraceptive options and what they would like family planning services to provide. We would like to study this so that we can provide a better, and more equal, contraceptive service.

We will recruit and train female community researchers from Black African, Black Caribbean and South Asian backgrounds. The community researchers will organise groups from their own backgrounds, to come together to talk confidentially about contraception. We will ask them where, if anywhere, they get contraception from (GPs, clinics, pharmacies, etc.) and if they would like this to change. We will interview women individually if they do not want to be in a group. Interpreters will be used so that we can include women who do not speak English.

The results of this study will be used to identify any differences in opinions about contraception, or the way that it is provided, amongst different ethnic group members. This will help us understand any difficulties faced by women from ethnic minorities when trying to access family planning services and how we can overcome these difficulties. In future research, we plan to use our results to work with women to develop a method to improve services.