Approaches to evaluating abortion training programs: A scoping review

The number of abortion training programs has increased in recent years, and there is growing interest in evaluating program outcomes, including reach, efficacy, and learner experiences. Our objective was to identify and summarize evaluations of abortion training programs in research literature.

We used scoping review methodology to explore program evaluations of abortion training programs in the English-language research literature (January 2000 -July 2025).

Thirty-three evaluations of abortion training programs met the inclusion criteria; 20 evaluated medical resident training, primarily Family Medicine (n = 11) or OBGYN (n = 9), and three included advanced practice clinicians and were published over 7 years ago. Twenty-four unique outcome measures were identified and grouped thematically into five domains. Measures from the Technical competence domain were used in the most studies (n = 16, 48.5%) and had the highest number of unique outcomes (n = 14, 58.3%). Next, studies used outcomes from the Intention to provide abortion domain (n = 17, 51.5%), followed by Abortion provision after training domain (n = 12, 36.4%), Program-related measures (n = 5, 15.1%), and Patient-centered measures domain (n = 2, 0.06%).

This scoping review found a predominance of program evaluations focused on physician trainees. Most used five conceptual domains of abortion evaluation, but lacked consensus on specific measures within the domains and across studies. Future abortion training program evaluations would be strengthened by multidisciplinary consensus on a comprehensive set of evaluation domains and common measures, and inclusion of abortion training programs offered to learners from all health professional disciplines engaged in abortion care to advance access to quality care.