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. 2025 May 14:13:1529169.
doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1529169. eCollection 2025.

Championing reproductive and perinatal health with the recovery community: improving access to healthcare and health promotion resources to support recovery

Hartley Feld  1 , Alex Elswick  2 , Jeremy Byard  1 , Whitney Beckett  1 , Amanda Fallin-Bennett  1
Affiliations

Championing reproductive and perinatal health with the recovery community: improving access to healthcare and health promotion resources to support recovery

Hartley Feld et al. Front Public Health. .

Abstract

Peer recovery support services are instrumental in the promotion of long-term recovery primarily by focusing on building the recovery capital of people with substance use disorders. Women may have specific health-related needs that are not generally part of recovery support staff training. Our team co-created a model by training people with lived experience as coaches to promote the health of women with SUD during the critical period of their reproductive years when mortality from overdose risk is high and can be compounded by issues surrounding pregnancy. We explored the outcomes of a small pilot test of this model to promote reproductive autonomy in a recovery community center (RCC). The RCC and the champion-trained peer recovery coach were able to increase their reach to women of reproductive age and facilitated linkage to healthcare and health-promoting resources. The model has the potential to improve the participants' abilities to access reproductive and perinatal health resources and healthcare that could lead to improvements in their recovery.

Keywords: community-engaged; pregnancy; pregnancy intention; recovery; reproductive health; substance use disorder.

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Conflict of interest statement

AF-B is a co-founder of Voices of Hope. Alex Elswick is a co-founder and Board Member of Voices of Hope. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Levesque conceptual framework for healthcare access. Reproduced with permission from “A conceptual framework of access to health care” by Jean-Frederic Levesque, Mark F Harris and Grant Russell, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Figure 2
Figure 2
What is the BARC-10? Reproduced with permission from “Assessing Addiction Severity with the BARC-10: A Comprehensive Tool for Clinical Practice and Research”, Pennsylvania Recovery Center LLC.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Perinatal and reproductive champion of health and harm reduction (PeRCHH) model.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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