To the Editor: In their article, De Costa and colleagues1 clearly demonstrate the importance of making mifepristone freely available for prescription to all registered Australian medical practitioners, and they emphasise that the current need for special registration discourages general practitioners to become involved in medical abortion provision. We conducted a cross‐sectional study of 39 GPs and 30 primary health care nurses from regional or rural Victoria and identified additional uptake barriers.2
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- 1. de Costa CM, Black KI, Russell DB. Medical abortion: it is time to lift restrictions. Med J Aust 2019; 210: 248–249. https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2019/210/6/medical-abortion-it-time-lift-restrictions
- 2. de Moel‐Mandel C, Graham M, Taket A. A snapshot of medication abortion provision in the primary health care setting of regional and rural Victoria. Aust J Rural Health 2019; 27(3): 237–44.
- 3. Dawson AJ, Nicolls R, Bateson D, et al. Medical termination of pregnancy in general practice in Australia: a descriptive‐interpretive qualitative study. Reprod Health 2017; 14: 39.
- 4. World Health Organization. Health worker roles in providing safe abortion care and post‐abortion contraception. Geneva: WHO, 2015. https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/181041/9789241549264_eng.pdf (viewed Apr 2019).
- 5. Hyland P, Raymond EG, Chong E. A direct‐to‐patient telemedicine abortion service in Australia: Retrospective analysis of the first 18 months. Aust N Z J Obstet Gynaecol. 2018; 58: 335–340.
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