Developing a Scale to Measure Obstetric and Gynaecology Professionals’ Attitudes towards Medical Termination of Pregnancy and Emergency Contraception Services, Kerala, India

Abstract

Medical termination of pregnancy (MTP) services and emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs) are legal in India. Despite this, there are barriers to women’s access due to provider resistance towards these services. It is important to understand the obstetrics and gynaecology professionals’ (OGPs) attitudes towards MTP and ECP services. The Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies (AMCHSS) scale with 20 items, 16 related to MTPs and 4 related to ECPs, was developed and validated to measure the attitude of OGPs towards provisioning of MTP and ECP services in circumstances when it is legally acceptable in India. The study used a cross-sectional survey among 14 experts and 106 randomly selected OGPs in two southern districts of Kerala state, India for scale development, validation and reliability testing. The scale was validated with a significant correlation of 0.614 ( p < 0.001) between the attitude score and the score obtained from the vignettes. Its reliability score using intra-class correlation coefficient was r = 0.906 (CIs: 0.781–0.957).