General information Family Planning is offering a range of sexual and reproductive health services, including contraception services, during the Covid-19 lockdown. Services are being offered virtually rather than face-to-face. On 31 March alone close to 500 people had an appointment with one of our clinicians. Available services include: ·
pill starts and repeats
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emergency contraception
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advice and information about abortion services.
· people requiring depo provera or those who are due to have an implant replaced are being offered a pill prescription We’ve also removed the co-payment charge for New Zealand Residents, making our services entirely free for them during the lockdown. Clients are being encouraged to use the ask for an appointment form on our website to connect with us. Information for clinicians Family Planning has developed guidance for clinicians about the provision of contraception during a pandemic lockdown. The guidance is based on guidelines developed by the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Health in the United Kingdom, adapted to suit New Zealand contraception usage and availability. There will be ongoing need for contraception during the lockdown, just as there is during any other emergency, and we hope our guidance will be of assistance to GPs and others who are not regularly prescribing contraception. People are concerned about managing pregnancy risk and we want to support our clinical colleagues to provide these services, especially when we know many of them will be working as we are, offering services remotely. They can be reassured that providing progestogen only pill is a really safe option within minimal assessment for the majority of women. Assistance for clinicians is also available by emailing advice@familyplanning.org.nz. In addition; Family Planning continues working with the MoH to clarify which sexual and reproductive health consultations are considered essential services. I want to reassure you that the MoH has been incredibly helpful getting us through any of the challenges that we have found while getting our services up and running. They are also clear that contraception is an essential service. We initially closed the clinics and cancelled appointments for two days (24 and 25 March) and worked to enhance our virtual services. On Thursday 26 March we opened our on-line booking with the revised services we were able to offer. We are only taking bookings through our web based booking requests (ask for an appointment) as this helps us filter out the requests that are outside of what we can provide virtually. We now have up to 40 clinicians working on virtual appointments throughout the country. They have fairly full clinics, prioritising ECP and abortion information requests and providing contraceptive pills.