Barriers to Infertility Treatment: An Integrated Study

BACKGROUND: Infertility is one of the most important events in life. Despite the negative impact of infertility, a significant number of women struggling to conceive do not consult a physician and do not fallow up infertility treatment. This integrated study aimed to investigate a large amount of factors which influenced discontinuation of infertility treatment. METHODS: This integrated study (qualitative – quantitative study) was done on infertile women who had referred to infertility center in Jahrom University of medical sciences using purposive sampling. In the first study, data were collected from a valid questionnaire with 22 questions in a 5-point likert scale about barriers to infertility treatments and in the second study, as a phenomenology approach, data collection was done using deep unstructured interviews and focused groups were aimed to identify deep individual experiences about it. RESULTS: major barriers to infertility treatments included the probability of treatment failure (52.5%), couple’s age and possibility of high risk pregnancy (51.5%), Painfulness of some treatment methods such as laparoscopy (50.5%). Qualitative results led to the identification of three main themes: Nature of treatment, negative thinking, social and cultural factors. CONCLUSION: As a result, we suggest family education and enrichment of cultural context in the field of infertility; infertile people would be willing to pursue infertility treatments.