Journal of midwifery & women's health
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J Midwifery Womens Health · Jul 2011
Integration of routine rapid HIV screening in an urban family planning clinic.
Family planning centers can play an important role in HIV screening, education, and risk-reduction counseling for women who are sexually active. This article describes how 1 urban Title X-funded family planning clinic transitioned from using a designated HIV counselor for targeted testing to a model that uses clinic staff to provide integrated, routine, nontargeted, rapid HIV testing as standard of care. ⋯ Integrating routine HIV screening into a family planning clinic can be critical to identifying new HIV infections in women. This initiative demonstrated that routine, nontargeted, rapid HIV screening can be offered successfully as a standard of care in a high-volume, urban, reproductive health care setting. This description and evaluation of the process of changing the model of HIV testing in a clinic setting is useful for clinicians who are interested in expanding routine HIV testing in their clinics.
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J Midwifery Womens Health · Jul 2011
Postpartum care: evaluation and experience among care providers and care receivers.
There have been substantial alterations in the structure of postpartum care over the last several decades. Our aim was to investigate the perceived quality of, and satisfaction with, postpartum care among caregivers and care receivers in the maternity ward of a community hospital in Norway with about 2600 births per year. ⋯ By exploring both the caregivers' and care receivers' evaluations and expectations of the actual services in the maternity ward, areas for enhancement of the quality of the ward and its services can be detected and carried out. The present study revealed 2 areas needing further focus: assistance with child care during the night and teaching of child-care skills during the stay. We believe that investigations that collect data from both caregivers and care receivers, by using adapted and validated questionnaires to gather information on quality and satisfaction with the maternity ward, are mandatory for improvement and continuous adaptation of health services.