Optimizing Hormonal Contraception: The Pharmacist’s Guide to Patient-Centred Care

Dear Colleagues,

The availability and accessibility of contraception is essential in empowering individuals to choose whether and when to become pregnant whilst preventing unintended pregnancy. Supporting individuals’ reproductive autonomy is an important public health and reproductive justice issue as unintended pregnancy can influence their social, economic and mental well-being. Legislative, policy and practice changes have enabled in some countries for pharmacists’ to extend their scope of practice, authorizing the dispensing and prescribing of hormonal contraceptive methods. The increasing accessibility of hormonal contraceptive methods in pharmacy addresses access barriers whist supporting patients to choose when and through what healthcare setting they wish to access contraception. With this increased availability of hormonal contraception in pharmacy, patient-centred care is crucial as it supports the meaningful engagement of patients in shared-decision making through an exchange of knowledge, preferences and information.

This Special Issue focuses on pharmacists optimizing hormonal contraception use and access from a patient-centred care perspective. We invite submissions on various aspects of the topic, addressing but not limited to the practice of patient-centred care:

• Why do pharmacists need to and how can they can go about providing patient-centred care as they expand their scope of practice through the dispensing and prescribing of hormonal contraception?
• What does patient-centred care mean from the patient perspective as they access hormonal contraceptives?
• What role do pharmacists play and how can pharmacists take steps to provide patient-centred care?
• What service delivery initiatives have been implemented to build the evidence for the role of pharmacists in this area?
• What has been the impact of expanding pharmacists’ scope of practice, i.e., has it increased access and choice around hormonal contraceptives for patients and patient and pharmacist satisfaction with service delivery?

Original research articles, review articles, methods papers, case studies, short reports and commentaries will be considered for publication. 

Dr. Safeera Hussainy
Dr. Anisa Assifi
Dr. Mollie Ashe Scott
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Pharmacy is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• hormonal contraception
• patient-centred care
• service delivery
• pharmacist scope of practice