Research indicates that patient-centered health care is linked to better health outcomes and reduced health disparities. Patient-centered care is a model that prioritizes shared decision making between patients, families, and providers—rather than a top-down, provider-driven approach—by centering patients’ needs, values, preferences, and desired health outcomes. A growing body of research has focused on framing and developing measures of patient-centered family planning care that can be used for monitoring and improving the quality of care, particularly around contraceptive counseling.
More recently, there has been a call to extend the field’s understanding of patient-centered care beyond contraceptive care, to additionally include fertility and prenatal services, wellness exams, and sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing and treatment. While some measures have been developed in these domains, they primarily focus on prenatal and maternal care and were developed for use in low- and middle-income countries.
To help ensure that U.S.-based family planning providers can better assess the needs and experiences of their clients seeking all SRH services, Child Trends developed an eight-item scale of Patient-Centered Sexual and Reproductive Health Care (PCSRHC). This measure builds directly on existing patient-centered contraceptive care measures, supplemented with additional items informed by insights from qualitative research carried out with Title X family planning providers and clients. We piloted this measure with a sample of over 1,000 women with low incomes—who are thus most likely to be eligible for publicly funded services—who had received any sexual and reproductive health (SRH) care in the past year. In this brief, we describe the PCSRHC scale and, to help assess its face validity, we document its association with other measures of visit quality.
Suggested citation
Finocharo, J., Wildsmith, E., Pliskin, E., Manlove, J., & Welti, K. (2025). Developing a Measure to Assess Patient-Centered Sexual and Reproductive Health Care. Child Trends. DOI: 10.56417/5930v5481x