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How to Become a RHEDI Program

Are you interested in your residency becoming a RHEDI program?

Perspectives from RHEDI Directors:

"I’m living my dream of integrating abortion into the primary care space, and training our next generation of family physicians to have the expectation to provide comprehensive reproductive care into their practices with the skills to do it!"
Elana Craemer, MD, MPH, DirectorWomen’s Health, Long Beach Memorial Care Family Medicine Residency
"Being a RHEDI program has been an advantage for us both in terms of curriculum design, and for recruitment. Many applicants are interested in coming to a RHEDI program where they know abortion training is part of the curriculum, along with everything else we do in family medicine."
Heather Paladine, MD Program DirectorNY Presbyterian - Columbia Family Medicine Residency Program
"Being a part of RHEDI has been wonderful for our mission of training family physicians in full spectrum reproductive health. The RHEDI platform provides a wealth of well designed and often updated learning resources for our residents. It fills in gaps and bolsters the learning they get in clinic and in didactics. For the faculty, being part of RHEDI has meant having a supportive network of colleagues and being part of the conversations to make reproductive healthcare more inclusive and focused on social justice."
Ariel Leifer, MD University of Illinois at Chicago Family Medicine Residency
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Why become a RHEDI program?

RHEDI’s mission is to integrate high-quality, patient-centered abortion and contraception training and services into U.S. family medicine residencies using the Reproductive Justice framework, and more broadly, to mainstream abortion care within family medicine. Integrating comprehensive sexual and reproductive health (SRH) training in family medicine normalizes the provision of abortion care within primary care, enhances continuity care for patients, and expands options for those who may prefer to have an abortion in their own physician’s office.

 

We have supported over 30 family medicine residency programs across the country to become RHEDI programs, and encourage other residencies to work with us to become RHEDI programs!

RHEDI programs report:

  • Increased interest from residency applicants (reported by 93% of RHEDI directors)
  • Improved skills and competence for both residents and faculty in medication and aspiration abortion, options counseling, miscarriage management, ultrasound, and contraception including LARC methods
  • Increased interest from and retention of faculty interested in providing and teaching comprehensive SRH care
  • Increased opportunities for research
  • Improved patient care and patient satisfaction through increased access to streamlined, same-day SRH services in their own physician’s office

RHEDI offers its programs (and prospective programs):

  • Technical assistance to:
    • initiate abortion and contraception services and training in continuity sites
    • identify and develop partnerships with high volume training sites
    • set up and customize RHEcourse, the reproductive health education platform designed by Innovating Education in Reproductive Health that allows instructors to assign content to learners, track their progress, and evaluate comprehension
  • Curricular resources to enhance resident and faculty education on evidence-based SRH care, using the Reproductive Justice framework
  • Small grant support for faculty salaries to work on the implementation of RHEDI program expectations and processes
  • Connection to the growing RHEDI community through annual gatherings at national family medicine conferences, grand rounds, RHEDI directors meetings, and webinars
  • Mentorship and technical assistance on reproductive health-related research projects which may include assistance with study design, proposal development, data analysis, and dissemination

Here’s what you should know:

Criteria for becoming a RHEDI program include:

  • All learning informed by the Reproductive Justice (RJ) framework
  • Inclusive language in training and patient care settings
  • Resident learning objectives regarding:
    • Contraception care
    • Non-coercive, non-judgmental, patient-led contraception counseling
    • LARC insertion and removal
    • Options counseling for positive pregnancy tests
    • Medication and procedural abortion provision
    • Miscarriage care
  • Program faculty who demonstrate competency in all of the above resident knowledge criteria and RJ principles
  • Didactic and curricular requirements focused on sexual and reproductive health (SRH), RJ tenets, and hands-on workshops for contraceptive and abortion procedures
  • Integration of abortion into the family medicine residency clinic

 

Additional goals may include a sexual and reproductive health (SRH) residency track and/or area of concentration, policies to increase recruitment and retention of BIPOC and URM faculty and residents, and formal mentorship programs for BIPOC and URM residents.

You can download the full list of program expectations here.

If you are interested in learning more, please contact us at info@rhedi.org. We can describe the certification process, and discuss technical assistance options to help your program meet all of the expectations. In addition, a small amount of grant funding may be available to support faculty time for administration or training.

If your program does not have integrated abortion training, but you would like to be listed as a RHEDI-affiliated program, please contact us at info@rhedi.org.

Download Program Expectations:

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