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Syrian refugee women’s access to family planning services and modern contraception during overlapping crises in Bekaa, Lebanon
BACKGROUND: Political, financial, and pandemic crises in Lebanon have affected both provision of reproductive health services including family planning and modern contraception methods as well as women’s interest and ability to seek those services. This study aims to explore the impact of the compou...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10481481/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37674178 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12905-023-02613-8 |
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author | Mourtada, Rima Melnikas, Andrea J. |
author_facet | Mourtada, Rima Melnikas, Andrea J. |
author_sort | Mourtada, Rima |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Political, financial, and pandemic crises in Lebanon have affected both provision of reproductive health services including family planning and modern contraception methods as well as women’s interest and ability to seek those services. This study aims to explore the impact of the compounding crises on the provision and use of family planning services including modern contraception methods for Syrian refugees in Lebanon focusing on the perspectives of Syrian refugee women. METHODS: We carried out 12 Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with 119 Syrian refugee women recruited from two cities in West Bekaa, Lebanon from inside and outside the informal tented settlements. We used Skype video calls to moderate the FGDs due to the limited mobility at the time of the study because of Covid-19. We used thematic analyses to analyse the data. RESULTS: The crises seemed to exacerbate supply side barriers, which influenced provision of family planning services and women’s demand for them. These included Covid-19 regulations and maltreatment by staff at public health facilities, disruption of outreach reproductive health services that provide family planning and modern contraception, and reduced supply of modern contraception methods. On the demand side, women reported financial limitations in accessing and paying for services, concern over being infected with Covid-19, and concerns about insecurity. CONCLUSIONS: We suggest possible interventions to address these challenges and better reach these populations. These include using mobile health technology (mHealth) that may provide contraceptive counselling and/or can inform refugee women about where they may receive family planning and modern contraception. These services may also support Syrian refugees to access care they are entitled to receive and may also address disruptions in service provision due to overlapping crises, including availability and rising costs of contraceptives. These can be coupled with mobile outreach reproductive health services that provide family planning. We also suggest considering the provision of Long Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC) for Syrian refugee women, which would reduce a barrier of needing to revisit health facilities to obtain an additional supply of contraception pills. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12905-023-02613-8. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10481481 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-104814812023-09-07 Syrian refugee women’s access to family planning services and modern contraception during overlapping crises in Bekaa, Lebanon Mourtada, Rima Melnikas, Andrea J. BMC Womens Health Research BACKGROUND: Political, financial, and pandemic crises in Lebanon have affected both provision of reproductive health services including family planning and modern contraception methods as well as women’s interest and ability to seek those services. This study aims to explore the impact of the compounding crises on the provision and use of family planning services including modern contraception methods for Syrian refugees in Lebanon focusing on the perspectives of Syrian refugee women. METHODS: We carried out 12 Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with 119 Syrian refugee women recruited from two cities in West Bekaa, Lebanon from inside and outside the informal tented settlements. We used Skype video calls to moderate the FGDs due to the limited mobility at the time of the study because of Covid-19. We used thematic analyses to analyse the data. RESULTS: The crises seemed to exacerbate supply side barriers, which influenced provision of family planning services and women’s demand for them. These included Covid-19 regulations and maltreatment by staff at public health facilities, disruption of outreach reproductive health services that provide family planning and modern contraception, and reduced supply of modern contraception methods. On the demand side, women reported financial limitations in accessing and paying for services, concern over being infected with Covid-19, and concerns about insecurity. CONCLUSIONS: We suggest possible interventions to address these challenges and better reach these populations. These include using mobile health technology (mHealth) that may provide contraceptive counselling and/or can inform refugee women about where they may receive family planning and modern contraception. These services may also support Syrian refugees to access care they are entitled to receive and may also address disruptions in service provision due to overlapping crises, including availability and rising costs of contraceptives. These can be coupled with mobile outreach reproductive health services that provide family planning. We also suggest considering the provision of Long Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC) for Syrian refugee women, which would reduce a barrier of needing to revisit health facilities to obtain an additional supply of contraception pills. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12905-023-02613-8. BioMed Central 2023-09-06 /pmc/articles/PMC10481481/ /pubmed/37674178 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12905-023-02613-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Research Mourtada, Rima Melnikas, Andrea J. Syrian refugee women’s access to family planning services and modern contraception during overlapping crises in Bekaa, Lebanon |
title | Syrian refugee women’s access to family planning services and modern contraception during overlapping crises in Bekaa, Lebanon |
title_full | Syrian refugee women’s access to family planning services and modern contraception during overlapping crises in Bekaa, Lebanon |
title_fullStr | Syrian refugee women’s access to family planning services and modern contraception during overlapping crises in Bekaa, Lebanon |
title_full_unstemmed | Syrian refugee women’s access to family planning services and modern contraception during overlapping crises in Bekaa, Lebanon |
title_short | Syrian refugee women’s access to family planning services and modern contraception during overlapping crises in Bekaa, Lebanon |
title_sort | syrian refugee women’s access to family planning services and modern contraception during overlapping crises in bekaa, lebanon |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10481481/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37674178 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12905-023-02613-8 |
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