Courses for medical residents and trainers in Turkey for promotion of quality of reproductive health services: a pilot study.

In order to provide high quality services in reproductive health, training of health professionals is essential. In Turkey, a project for in-service training of medical residents was conducted in 2003 under the aegis of the Human Resources Development Foundation, the Turkish Ministry of Health and UNFPA. The project included a needs assessment, training programme development and evaluation activities.

Development of training of trainers programmes and evaluation of their effectiveness in Istanbul, Turkey.

This report presents an evaluation of the impact of the 'Training of Trainers' (TOT) courses conducted since 1997. The effects of TOT programmes were studied using a questionnaire given to the course participants immediately after and again following a minimum period of six months after completion of the course. The 85 participants included in this analysis were medical teachers from the Istanbul Faculty of Medicine, of whom 17% were instructors, 39% were associate professors and 44% full professors.

Contraceptive choice and reproductive morbidity in Istanbul.

A cross-sectional survey was conducted in Istanbul to investigate the relationship between contraceptive choice and reproductive morbidity. Altogether, 918 women who had ever used any means of avoiding pregnancy were interviewed at home, and, among these, 694 parous nonpregnant women were examined by three female physicians. The women were aware of bearing a considerable burden of ill health, with 81 percent reporting at least one episode of illness in the three months prior to the interview.

Asking questions about women's reproductive health: validity and reliability of survey findings from Istanbul.

In countries where population-based data on health problems are scarce, the extent of reproductive morbidity can be estimated from replies in structured interviews as a complement or as an alternative to reports from physician's examination and laboratory tests. We examined the sensitivity and specificity of detected morbidity based on these replies as compared to medical diagnoses and explored the consistency of replies when the questionnaire was administered twice, by two types of interviewers in different environments. Data were collected in a cross-sectional survey in Istanbul.

Clinical algorithms for the screening of Chlamydia trachomatis in Turkish women.

Objective: To test the diagnostic validity of clinical algorithms for the detection of Chlamydia trachomatis in an urban population of married women in Turkey.

Design: Cross-sectional population-based survey.

Subjects: A systematic sample of 867 women who reported the use of contraceptive methods.