Quality of Medication Abortion Services From Pharmacies and Drugstores in Ethiopia: A Two‐Stage Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To assess the quality of medication abortion (MA) services provided in pharmacies and drugstores ('pharmaceutical outlets') in Ethiopia. DESIGN: A two-stage cross-sectional study. SETTING: Pharmaceutical outlets in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. SAMPLE: Phase 1: 1696 pharmaceutical outlets listed in the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health Master Facility Registry, plus 187 additional outlets identified in the field. Phase 2: Selected 600 pharmaceutical outlets. METHODS: After assessing stock availability in phase 1, during phase 2, mystery clients (MCs) visited pharmaceutical outlets to evaluate service quality using an adapted version of the Abortion Care Quality (ACQ) Tool. Descriptive statistics were used to characterise the quality of services provided by the outlets. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The quality of abortion services provided by pharmaceutical outlets. RESULTS: Abortion medications were sold without prescriptions in 23.5% of MC visits. Among these sales, client respect (95.7%) and confidentiality (84.4%) were high. Additionally, 67.1% of staff gave correct instructions on dosage, timing, and administration of the medications. However, less than half of the MCs received adequate information on possible complications (36.4%). Almost all medications purchased were unexpired, packaged in aluminum, and of a known brand (96.5%); however, none were characterised as affordable. CONCLUSIONS: Pharmaceutical outlets demonstrated moderate quality for MA services, yet there were notable gaps in counselling for physical side effects and complications, and affordability challenges. With appropriate policy adjustments and training interventions, there is potential to integrate pharmaceutical outlets into the abortion care service delivery infrastructure, ensuring equitable access to safe and effective abortion services in Ethiopia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".