Abstract
Sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services are crucial for women especially during disasters, to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity from miscarriages, unsafe abortions, and post-abortion complications. This study explored the SRH interventions provided during disaster response. A systematic review was conducted to identify what menstrual regulation (MR), safe abortion (SA), and post-abortion care (PAC) approaches/interventions exist to promote resilience in the health system in disaster settings; what intervention components were most effective; and challenges and opportunities to meeting SRH rights. Five electronic databases were searched, resulting in 4194 records. Following the screening process, seven publications were included. The intervention-related information in each publication was assessed based on availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality. Two SRH approaches/interventions were found. The effectiveness of intervention components could not be conducted due to the limited number of relevant studies. Challenges were found at facility and community levels, and opportunities included overcoming them, making MR, SA, and PAC integral to the mitigation phase, and policy change to overcome barriers related to unaffordability and inaccessibility. Recommendations are provided to encourage research and policy towards improving neglected SRH in disaster settings to realize Sustainable Development Goal 3 and the Global Strategy and Sendai Framework’s priority to promote disaster-resilient health systems.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 359-373 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | International Journal of Disaster Risk Science |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 12 Jun 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 30 Jun 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright © The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Funding
This systematic review was initiated as part of a bigger research project funded by the government of Bangladesh\u2019s National Institute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT), Ministry of Health and Family Planning under the ambit of the Procurement of Services Package NPS 29: \u201CSexual and Reproductive Health Services in Remote and Hard-to-Reach Areas of Bangladesh (Operations Research) and Related Services.\u201D One of the aims of this project was to identify SRH interventions for MR and PAC that could be adopted for hard-to-reach disaster-prone health facilities of Barguna District of Barisal Division and Sunamganj District of Sylhet Division. Therefore, some of the selection criteria, such as excluding humanitarian crises in the review, are influenced by this project.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| government of Bangladesh’s National Institute of Population Research and Training | |
| NIPORT | |
| Ministry of Health and Family Planning | |
| Hard-to-Reach Areas of Bangladesh |
Keywords
- Abortion
- Disasters
- Sendai framework
- Sexual and reproductive health
- Sustainable development goal