The Mobile Outreach Clinic recently won a grant as part of the UF Medical Guild’s Special Projects to provide long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) for local underserved women. Congratulations to Michelle Nall, ARNP, Kelly Likos, BA, and Isabel Walker, BA for their hard work and commitment to helping underserved women in our community!
In 2016, MOC created a LARC program that has been offering intrauterine devices (IUDs) and birth control implants to uninsured women. The UF Medical Guild funding received in 2018 allowed for the purchase of IUDs to keep in stock, reducing financial and access barriers to these devices for underserved women.
Why Long-Acting Reversible Contraception?
Unintended pregnancies are associated with higher levels of long-term health consequences such as maternal depression, intimate partner violence, decreased educational achievement, and overall worse outcomes in the mental and physical wellbeing of children.
Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) present a highly effective and user-friendly contraceptive choice. LARC methods boast impressive rates of efficacy that rival those of permanent sterilization. LARC has the benefit of being easily reversible and allows women to plan a pregnancy when desired by having the device removed.
Improving access to LARC for local women without health insurance has the capacity to improve the health and wellbeing of our community’s women and children, and society at large.
None of these women have health insurance, and the LARC devices would have been prohibitively expensive (usually ranging $800-$1000 per device) without the MOC LARC Program and its funders. We expect these numbers to continue to increase as we are able to stock LARC devices and as women in the community continue to hear about the robust contraceptive services we offer.
In the past year, MOC has seen an increase in women seeking the birth control implant, such that funding has been sought to purchase implants to have in stock and allow for same-day insertion, considered “best practice” standard of care. With its flexible approach to patient care, MOC is in a unique position to offer same-day LARC insertions to women at high risk for the negative sequelae of unintended pregnancy.
Check out this link to learn more about this type of LARC (Nexplanon): https://www.bedsider.org/methods/implant.
Congratulations again to Michelle (bottom left), Kelly (bottom right), and Isabel! Michelle is a provider at our clinic and Kelly and Isabel are both Care Coordinators with MOC.
