Michele Stranger Hunter’s latest blog looks at the need to go beyond individual change to changing ‘the system’.
Listening Session
Voices from the Margin: Part 2
HPBL Consultant, Michele Stranger Hunter explores the views of the women participating in these one-to-one Listening Sessions and her own reflections upon their meaning. The Listening Sessions were conducted as individual interviews with patients registered at Edinburgh’s Access Place.
Voices from the Margin: Part 1
Edinburgh Access HPBL Listening Session, Part 1 Inger McGowan QN and Michele Stranger Hunter The views and advice of marginalised, traumatised women about their lived experience of reproductive health and pregnancy are too rarely solicited, heard or heeded. One mission of QNIS’ Healthier Pregnancies, Better Lives programme is to redress that inequity. The overall results…
General Practice and Reproductive Health:
Primary care’s potential for pre-pregnancy counselling, assessments and services is a golden opportunity to prevent harm and promote health. It arose from their understanding that people of reproductive age are rarely getting the information and assistance they need from other health professionals. They understand that primary care providers are usually best placed within Scotland’s healthcare system to play this new role.
General Practice and Reproductive Health:
Listening Sessions are a key part of QNIS’ Healthier Pregnancies, Better Lives programme. Lorna Dhami QN and I have been ‘testing the water’ on how prospective parents feel about their reproductive health care, and how General Practice Nurses feel about providing information, services and support in this area. Our focus was specifically on preconception and interconception health care. This included screening to identify risks and either eliminate or mitigate those risks prior to conception.
They Spoke, We Listened
In looking internationally for answers 12 years ago, I realised policies and practices in reproductive health and pregnancy are not universal. Instead, they are deeply embedded in cultural and societal norms. That is why a strategy and tool developed in the U.S. cannot simply be franchised and remain effective in Scotland.
Nothing About Us Without Us
Preconception education, counselling and care – prior to a first or subsequent pregnancy – are the missing links in supporting healthier women, healthier pregnancies and improved birth outcomes. In my first blog for this series, I talked about increased access to affordable, effective contraception and how this was not the ‘magic bullet’ I thought it…
The Best Answers Come From Asking the Right Questions
I came of age just as birth control made it possible to be sexually active without becoming pregnant. Quite by serendipity, this was when I was hired to coordinate an alternative education program for pregnant teens. Six years, and six hundred pregnant teens later, my feelings, experiences and values coalesced into a lifelong commitment to…
