Women’s attitudes towards pessary self-care: a qualitative study

INTRODUCTION AND HYPOTHESIS: Patients with vaginal pessaries can learn to care for their pessary by themselves or they can have provider-led care, which requires more frequent follow-up visits. We aimed to understand motivations for and barriers to learning self-care of a pessary to inform strategies to promote pessary self-care. METHODS: In this qualitative study, we recruited patients recently fitted with a pessary for stress incontinence or pelvic organ prolapse, and providers who perform pessary fittings. Semi-structured, one-on-one interviews were completed to data saturation. A constructivist approach to thematic analysis using the constant comparison method was used to analyze interviews. A coding frame was created following independent review of a subset of interviews by three members of the research team and this frame was used to code interviews and develop themes through interpretive engagement with the data. RESULTS: Ten pessary users and four health care providers (physicians and nurses) participated. Three major themes were identified: motivators, benefits, and barriers. There were several motivators for learning self-care, including care provider advice, personal hygiene, and ease of care. Benefits of learning self-care included autonomy, convenience, facilitation of sexual relations, avoidance of complications, and decreased burden on the health care system. Barriers to self-care included physical, structural, mental, and emotional barriers; lack of knowledge; lack of time; and social taboo. CONCLUSIONS: Promotion of pessary self-care should focus on patient education about benefits and ways of mitigating common barriers while focusing on normalizing patient engagement in pessary self-care.