PRACTICE SUPPORTS

Merry-K Moos, FNP, MPH, RN, FAAN developed model interconception care plans for women who had poor pregnancy outcomes. She has given us permission to post them here. The plans vary by the type of poor pregnancy outcome the woman experienced and include information about assessments and interconception objectives for each patient.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), in collaboration with CDC, has developed the Drinking and Reproductive Health: A Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders Prevention Tool Kit. The tool kit is available at no charge to women's health care providers. To order the tool kit or to download, click here.

The You Decide: Making Informed Health Choices about Hormonal Contraception Tool Kit is designed to help health care providers better understand and speak to the risks and benefits of hormonal contraception. This tool kit is part of a comprehensive educational program created by Planned Parenthood® Federation of America, Inc. (PPFA) and the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals (ARHP). The kit, which can be downloaded at no cost from here, and includes:

• Self-Administered Patient History Form and Sample Physical Exam Form
• Contraceptive Efficacy Tools
• Patient Risk Comparison Tools
• Six-Step Plan: Responding to Announcements of Adverse Medical Events
• Additional Resources
• Glossary of Risk Terms and bibliography for additional reading.

The Reproductive Health Access Project has an excellent article on the Medical Eligibility for Initiating Contraception: Absolute and Relative Contraindications. Click here to access chart.

The March of Dimes webpage has a section of useful information on preconception health for clinicians and consumers. Click here to link to this resource.

Partnership for Prevention and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have worked together to bridge the gap between research and practice by developing The Community Health Promotion Handbook: Action Guides to Improve Community Health. The five Action Guides address diabetes management, physical activity, and tobacco-use treatment. Click here to link to this resource.

The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Volume 199, Issue 6, Supplement 2, December 2008 has a number of articles on the "Clinical Content of Preconception Care". Click here to access the articles.

Information about available Preconception Screening and Risk Assessment Tools can be reached here.

The Bright Futures for Women's Health and Wellness project, sponsored by HRSA, has a number of valuable tools for adolescent and adult women who want to decrease their health related risks. Materials can be accessed here. Numerous worksheets on the following topics are available: weight control, exercise, physical activity for women with physical limitations and for women living in rural areas; interpreting nutrition labels, making choices at the grocery store, calcium intake and improving iron intake. These worksheets could serve as a valuable adjunct to provider recommendations. Additional practice supports related to the Bright Futures project including promoting emotional well being can be found here.

MyPyramid offers personalized eating plans and interactive tools to help your patients plan and assess their food choices. The website includes interactive tools to personalize recommendations to one's own situation (overweight, underweight, normal weight, pregnant, breastfeeding) and is based on the dietary guidelines for Americans. MyPyramid can be accessed here and could be a good resource for your patients who are ready to make some changes in their nutritional status.

Girlshealth.gov was created to help girls (ages 10-16) learn about health, growing up, and issues they may face, and may be accessed here. While not specifically about preconceptional health, it focuses on health topics that girls are concerned about and helps motivate them to choose healthy behaviors for a lifetime by using positive, supportive, and non-threatening messages. The site is the winner of the Aesculapius 2008 Award of Excellence. The annual award is named for the ancient Greek god of healing, Aesculapius. This award was established by the Health Improvement Institute to promote informed consumer lifestyle choices and health care decisions. The site gives girls reliable, useful information on the health issues they will face as they become young women and tips on handling relationships with family and friends, at school and at home.

My Family Health Portrait represents the revised version of the Surgeon General's Family Health Tool, and is accessible here. It is a Web-enabled program that runs on any computer that is connected to the Web and running an up-to-date version of any major Internet browser. The new version of the tool offers numerous advantages over previous versions which had to be downloaded to the user's computer. The Surgeon General makes the tool freely available to all users. No user information is saved on any computer of the U.S. federal government. The Web-based tool helps users organize family history information and then print it out for presentation to their health care provider. Clinicians could direct patients to the site so that they can organize their family history in advance of a clinical visit or follow-up encounter. If you or your patients prefer a paper version of the tool to gather and record family information, it can be downloaded here. Versions of the tool are available in Spanish, Chinese, French, Polish and Portuguese.

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