Intrauterine contraception: impact of provider training on participant knowledge and provision

Background: In California's Medicaid family planning expansion, the Family Planning, Access, Care and Treatment (Family PACT) Program, only 1.9% of contracepting women received intrauterine contraception (IUC) in 2006. Ten skills-based IUC provider trainings were offered from 2007 to 2010.

Objective: The objective was to evaluate the impact of these trainings on participant knowledge of the broad range of appropriate IUC candidates and measure changes in IUC provision following training.

Study design: We evaluated changes in provider knowledge using a nine-item IUC Candidate Selection Scale on pre- and posttraining surveys. Changes in provision of IUC following the training were measured using Family PACT claims data. We compared changes in insertions posttraining to pretraining levels as well as to matched comparison sites that did not send trainees.

Results: Most participants at the training were advanced practice clinicians (70%) specializing in general primary care (77%) and practicing at community clinics (45%). Training participants increased their understanding of appropriate candidates (mean change in raw summary score=8.6, p<.001), from an average of 58% correct responses to 81%. Provider sites that participated in training provided a mean of 4.6 more women with IUC following training than during baseline (p<.01), an increase of 25% compared to only 7% increase among comparison sites. The impact of the training differed by practice size such that the largest and smallest clinics both changed IUC provision the most and had the largest differences over comparison sites.

Conclusions: This study shows that skills-based training is an important strategy for the increase of IUC provision.