Onm-3: Patient-Centeredness Fertility Care; A Solution Toward Pleasant Infertility Treatment: A Qualitative Study

Background: Infertility and its treatment involve a physical and emotional burden for both women and men, and that burden contributes to high drop-out rates from treatment. Lack of patient-centredness of care can cause patients to drop out from treatment for non-medical reasons. However, in order to provide patient-centred fertility care, an insight into the patient’s perspective on fertility care is required. Therefore a qualitative study aimed at exploring infertile couples’ experiences and understanding their needs during infertility treatment process was conducted. Materials and Methods: A qualitative design, based on a content analysis approach, was used to reach this study aim. After employing purposive sampling to choose 17 infertile couples who were seeking infertility treatment at the public and private infertility centers and infertility specialists clinics in Isfahan and Rasht, unstructured interviews were carried out to gather data.Also, taking field note were used to collect the data. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Results: During the data analysis, five main categories emerged including “sence of competency and self-efficacy ”, “sense of being valued and self-esteem”, “sense of confidence, trust and satisfaction”, “improve information, reinforce knowledge and understanding”, “financial support and facilitate the use of services”. The main common themes of categories were“empowerment and sense of adequacy”. Conclusion: This study showed that infertile couples beside of medical needs have a variety of problems and needs in the process of evaluating and treating infertility. Also through listening to patients, we learned that fertility clinics currently do not sufficiently meet patient’s needs. Recognizing these needs by health care providers and medical staffs could improve their interaction with patients and the patient-centeredness of their care.