Document Type

Article

Department

Centre of Excellence in Women and Child Health; Obstetrics and Gynaecology (East Africa)

Abstract

Our aim was to investigate the inclusion of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) topics in medical curricula and the perceived need for, feasibility of, and bar-riers to teaching SRHR. We distributed a survey with questions on SRHR content, and factors regulating SRHR content, to medical universities worldwide using chain referral. Associations between high SRHR content and independent variables were analyzed using unconditional linear regression or χ2 test. Text data were analyzed by thematic analysis. We collected data from 219 respondents, 143 universities and 54 countries. Clinical SRHR topics such as safe pregnancy and childbirth (95.7%) and contraceptive methods (97.2%) were more frequently reported as taught compared with complex SRHR topics such as sexual violence (63.8%), unsafe abortion (65.7%), and the vulnerability of LGBTQIA persons (23.2%). High SRHR content was associated with high- income level (P= 0.003) and low abortion restriction (P= 0.042) but varied within set-tings. Most respondents described teaching SRHR as essential to the health of society. Complexity was cited as a barrier, as were cultural taboos, lack of stakeholder recogni-tion, and dependency on fees and ranking.

Publication (Name of Journal)

International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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