Rice, Higgins make case for health care provider proficiency with contraceptives in Health Affairs blog

UW Ob-Gyn Department Chair Laurel Rice, MD, and UW Collaborative for Reproductive Equity Director Jenny Higgins, PhD, co-authored an article for Health Affairs outlining the reasons it’s critical that health care providers seek out accurate information on contraceptive care.

Inaccuracies or misunderstandings about how birth control works shape public perception and affect health care policy, and even health care providers are not immune from misinformation. In “The Need For Accurate Contraceptive Awareness And Advocacy Among Health Care Providers”, Rice and Higgins correct some common misconceptions about how contraceptive methods work, and argue that health care providers – as long as they’re armed with accurate knowledge – can be great advocates for comprehensive contraceptive policies:

“Health care providers can hardly be expected to hold exhaustive knowledge about the universe of medications and medical products. However, we argue that proficiency about contraception’s actual mechanisms is critically important…

… Medical professionals armed with accurate information have an opportunity to push back against, not perpetuate, larger cultural misperceptions and deliberate political myths about birth control. These myths do not merely represent a benign lack of knowledge but affect policies and programs, limiting people’s ability to access this essential public health and medical good.”

Read the whole article here.