Improving Access to Prenatal Care for Latina Immigrants in California: Outreach and Inreach Strategies

Abstract

The Latina Women's Project was developed to assess strategies for improving prenatal care outreach to low income Latina immigrant women in San Francisco. For this purpose, twelve focus group sessions with sixty-seven providers and consumers of prenatal care in the community were conducted in 1990. According to the participants, the principal barriers to effective utilization of care are socioeconomic and legal barriers, newcomer status, cultural attitudes and beliefs, cross-cultural communication and institutional constraints. The findings indicate that structural and cultural barriers to care can be addressed through improved outreach strategies. Outreach, which includes casefinding and motivation to seek early and sustained care, can be increased in a variety of ways ranging from improved information and health education, to cross-referral linkages with other programs or self-help networks and by providing free or low cost pregnancy tests that include counseling. The results also suggest that the removal of institutional barriers may require inreach strategies which modify policies, behaviors and management tools at the prenatal care site. The effective implementation of inreach and outreach strategies is recommended to design prenatal care programs for the Latino population.