Assessing abortion providers’ knowledge, attitude, and practice after the R3M program in Ghana

In an effort to reduce the mortality and morbidity associated with unsafe abortion in Ghana, in 2006 the government of Ghana, in association with 5 other organizations, implemented a program for improving comprehensive abortion care in the country. This program was piloted in seven districts across three regions – Greater Accra, Eastern, and Ashanti. In this paper, we use a survey specially collected for this study to assess if the interventions from this program have helped improve the knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) of health care providers towards comprehensive abortion care services. Since the program had not been implemented across the country, the study was set up as an experiment, with the treatment group including the districts where the program was implemented. The control group included districts where the program wasn’t implemented. Propensity score matching techniques will be used to compare the providers in the intervention and control groups, and to evaluate if the program has made any difference where it was implemented. We expect to find that districts where the saturation of interventions was the highest will show the maximum change in the KAP of abortion providers, thereby enabling improved abortion care services and ensuring better reproductive health among women.