Embargoed until 00:01 Thursday 14 November, 2013

New interactive tool shows benefits of nurses and midwives delivering contraception in UK

London, Thursday 14 November 2013: Marie Stopes International claims that a solution transforming healthcare in developing countries could save the NHS millions of pounds and help reduce the country’s high rate of unintended pregnancies.

“Task sharing” or “skill mix”  as it is known here in the UK - training health workers, such as nurses and midwives, to complete tasks otherwise carried out by doctors – has been used for years in countries like Ethiopia to overcome the shortage of doctors and increase access to reliable long-term methods of contraception, like implants. The UK has also used this approach in nurse-led services since the 1970s but is now lagging behind.

According to Marie Stopes International if implant use in the UK increased to the same proportion as Ethiopia, the cost to the NHS (in salaries) would be £15 million less if fitted by nurses rather than by doctors[i]. That amounts to a 10% saving of the entire contraception budget for England[ii].  

Nils Gade, Marie Stopes International’s Ethiopia Country Director said:

“Task sharing has helped to generate huge cost savings in Ethiopia and massively increased the availability of high quality family planning, particularly in isolated parts of the country where women struggle to get contraception. Yet up until now it has often been considered a stop-gap until countries had trained enough doctors. But our experience in Ethiopia proves that countries should embrace task sharing full-stop.”

Despite having a failure rate of less than 1%, the most recent estimate of national contraception use in the UK from 2009 suggested that only 1.4% of British contraception users were using the implant[iii], compared to 12.3% in Ethiopia[iv]. Instead, the UK still has a heavy reliance on the pill which has a failure rate of up to nine per cent over 12 months[v].

Marie Stopes International is launching a new task sharing impact model at the International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this week that will enable countries to estimate the potential cost savings task sharing could have for them.  It will also allow them to estimate how many more women they could reach through task sharing, and the increased health impacts that would result from this, including the prevention of unsafe abortions and maternal deaths.

Speaking at the Conference, the Rt. Hon. Baroness Jenny Tonge, Chair of the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health, said:

“The initiatives we are seeing with task sharing in Ethiopia are too good to keep to East Africa, the UK and countries the world over should seek to copy them to give women better care, more choice and create savings for the NHS.”

Cost savings are not the only benefit of course. Hard pressed family doctors – many of whom are already embracing task sharing and are well supported by excellent teams of nurses – would also be saving themselves valuable time to focus on more complicated cases.

Task sharing family planning to nurses in the UK is not an unrealistic aspiration. At Marie Stopes International’s nurse-led clinics, 40% of contraception clients already choose long-acting methods and new data from NHS community clinics suggest that implant use in the UK may have already increased significantly