Blog: Transforming abortion access beyond the pandemic: Patient experiences with at-home medical abortion through telemedicine in Australia
Fix L, Seymour J, Sandhu M, O’Brien J, Melville C, Mazza D, Thompson T-A. Transforming abortion access beyond the pandemic: Patient experiences with at-home medical abortion through telemedicine in Australia. BMJ Sexual and Reprpductive Health. July 2020.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine has emerged as key to sustaining access to essential reproductive health care services. Medical abortion care provided via telemedicine has been shown to be safe, effective, and acceptable to patients and providers. Prior to the current restrictions on local and global travel due to the pandemic, several different telemedicine models have been used in high-resource countries, such as Australia and the United States, to regularly deliver abortion care during the first trimester. In the US, the only service currently available for telemedicine for medical abortion is a clinic-to-clinic model, in which patients at one clinic are seen remotely by a provider at another clinic.