title: The Prescription of the Morning-After Pill in a Berlin Emergency Department Over a Four-Year Period - User Profiles and Reasons for Use.
abstract: Questions:There are no current health care studies from Germany regarding the "morning-after pill". This paper will use routine data to analyse details regarding the users' profiles, reasons for using it and the utilisation of hospital outpatient facilities.Patient Collective and Methods:Retrospective analysis of all triage sheets in the emergency department of the Virchow Hospital Campus/Charité University Hospital, Berlin, over a four-year period from 2007 to 2010 that were coded with the ICD diagnosis Z30 (= contraception advice) and statistical processing of the associated administrative data.Results:860 triage sheets were included in the analysis. The emergency department is used most frequently for the prescription of the "morning-after pill" at the weekend. The average age of the users was 25.1 years. The most common reason cited for needing emergency contraception was unprotected sexual intercourse, with the second-most common being "condom failure". Around half of the women attended the department within 12 hours of having unprotected sex. Less than 2 % (n = 14) of all women decided against a prescription of emergency contraceptive after counselling.Conclusions:The user profile and reasons for using emergency oral contraception correlate largely with the information contained in international literature. Although the "morning-after pill" is probably prescribed mainly in general practices in Germany, and despite the availability of new drugs with a permitted post-exposure interval of up to 120 hours after unprotected sex, there appears to still be a high demand for counselling and prescriptions of the "morning-after pill" in the context of the emergency department.
authors.affiliation: Department of Gynaecology, Charité - University Medicine Berlin, Virchow Hospital Campus, Berlin.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: David
authors.affiliation: Department of Gynaecology, Charité - University Medicine Berlin, Virchow Hospital Campus, Berlin.
authors.forename: A-M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Radke
authors.affiliation: Department of Obstetric Medicine, Charité - University Medicine Berlin, Virchow Hospital Campus, Berlin.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Pietzner
keywords: emergency contraception; emergency department; levonorgestrel; ulipristal acetate