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In early June, Ipas hosted a two-day invitational meeting on expanding access to safe medical abortion through pharmacies and pharmacy workers, which in many countries are a first point of contact for people seeking all types of health care.
Representing a wide range of organizations, professionals from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States came together to share information on how to best ensure that effective drugs for medical abortion are dispensed along with information that allows women to use the method safely and successfully and that links them to additional health-care services as needed.
Also called medication abortion or the abortion pill, medical abortion consists of pills that end a pregnancy through a process similar to miscarriage. The method has enormous potential to expand the health system’s reach, says Traci Baird, director of Ipas’s Medical Abortion Initiative.
“Pharmacies can serve as an important source of accurate information and medicines that provide an alternative to unsafe abortion practices,” Baird adds.
However, recent studies, including one in Contraception (vol. 79, no. 6) by Ipas’s Deborah Billings and Kathryn Andersen Clark, among others, found a knowledge gap about medical abortion among pharmacy workers. Working with pharmacy workers and pharmacy associations to address this gap and thereby to increase access to medical abortion was a primary strategy discussed at the Ipas meeting.
“For years pharmacists have been on the front line for women seeking medical abortion, often doing the best they can without specific training or resources ,” says Robyn Sneeringer, associate for Ipas’s Medical Abortion Initiative and coordinator of the invitational meeting. “It’s time that Ipas and other organizations collaborate with this cadre of health professionals to improve access to safe abortion care.”
Recent Ipas activities in African countries indicate willingness and, indeed, enthusiasm among pharmacists to be involved in safe abortion programming. For example, attendees of a national training for pharmacists in Lusaka, Zambia, in June formed a technical working group that will guide future training and activities on medical abortion among pharmacists.
Expanding access to medical abortion is a high priority for Ipas, which has worked since 1973 to reduce deaths and injuries from unsafe abortion. Strategies Ipas pursues in collaboration with many partners at the global, regional, national and local levels include training health-care providers, developing and disseminating informational materials for providers and women, and ensuring sustainable access to safe reproductive health technologies. In 2008, Ipas collaborated with local partners to train more than 4,000 health facility staff from 23 countries in safe provision of medical abortion.
For more information, contact media@ipas.org