Quality of Infertility Care Services and Emotional Health of South Asian Women.

Background

Treatment tolerability and treatment environment are two major spheres of infertility care that may associate with women's emotional health and coping mechanisms.

Aim

The present study aimed at assessing the relationship between infertility treatment quality and various aspects of emotion-focus coping, problem-focus coping, and avoidance coping mechanisms.

Method

The study was completed by using standardized tools and data from this descriptive, cross-sectional, correlational study were collected from 350 women undergoing infertility treatments in private reproductive healthcare centers in Quetta, Pakistan.

Findings

Treatment tolerability was found to be positively associated with positive reframing (p < 0.02) and negatively associated with the use of emotional support (p < 0.03); acceptance (p < 0.01); humor (p < 0.03); behavioral disengagement (p < 0.01) and venting (p < 0.01). The quality of the treatment environment demonstrated a negative correlation between religious coping (p < 0.02) and behavioral disengagement (p < 0.01), whereas it showed a positive correlation with active coping (p < 0.03) and planning (p < 0.02). The linear regression analysis demonstrated that treatment tolerability significantly increased with positive reframing (R2 = 0.118, F(304) = 2.22, p < 0.03). Behavioral disengagement significantly decreased with better treatment environment (R2 = 0.111, F(304) = 2.09, p < 0.02).

Discussion

We discussed the findings keeping in view the role of social, cultural, and economic factors related to infertility care in the context South-Asian culture, and recommendations are made to promote women's mental health and coping by improving some specific aspects of infertility treatment quality.

Conclusions

High treatment tolerability may associate with some useful aspects of emotion-focus coping, such as positive reframing, whereas low treatment tolerability may associate with avoidance coping, such as behavioral disengagement and venting. Besides, the quality of the infertility treatment environment enables women to use problem-focus coping mechanisms, such as planning and active coping.

Informations de copyright

© 2022 Hassan et al.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Sehar-un-Nisa Hassan reports the publication fee for the current analysis and publication was funded by University of Ha’il, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and financial support for data collection was from the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. The authors declare no other potential conflicts of interest in relation to this work and state that the funders had no role in the design of the study, in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data, in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.