Approximately 43.8 million abortions are performed annually worldwide. Nearly half of those abortions are performed unsafely. Complications of unsafe abortion are one of the main causes of maternal mortality globally. Studies addressing safe abortion practices report heterogeneous outcomes resulting in bias and making it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions across studies. Development and use of core outcome sets would help to improve the applicability of results and better address one of the most common procedures performed on women worldwide.
Protocol: "Standardizing abortion research outcomes (STAR): a protocol for developing, disseminating and implementing a core outcome set for medical and surgical abortion" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001078241730001X
World Health Organization
Dr. Katherine Whitehouse
Dr. Metin Gulmezoglu
Disease Category: Gynaecology, Pregnancy & childbirth
Disease Name: Abortion
Age Range: 10 - 60
Sex: Female
Nature of Intervention: Management of care, Operative and non-operative management, Postoperative management , Surgery
- Clinical experts
- Consumers (patients)
- Epidemiologists
- Governmental agencies
- Service providers
- COS for clinical trials or clinical research
- COS for practice
- Recommendations for outcome measures (measurement/how)
- Consensus meeting
- Delphi process
- Interview
- Systematic review
Stage 1: Identify possible outcomes
• Systematic review: randomised controlled trials evaluating safe induced abortion practices
• Qualitative patient interviews: Recruitment of patients via patient representative groups in at least one developed country and one developing country. Patients to take part in semi-structured interviews to identify common themes and identify possible outcomes of abortion.
• Outcome inventory: create comprehensive list of outcomes gleaned from review and patient interviews
Stage 2: Determine Core Outcomes
• Delphi process: Invite key stakeholders to participate in survey assessment of possible outcomes to refine list and work towards consensus
• Consensus meeting: key stakeholders and experts convene to deliberate on final core outcome set, including in this discussion is quality assessment to determine how outcomes should be measured.