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Introduction
No one can deny that the last 12 months have not been easy. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought chaos in the UK to the National Health Service (NHS), devastation to people’s lives and a change to our way of life that we would never have thought possible. As I write, more than 120 million people worldwide have tested positive for the virus and more than 2.6 million have sadly died.1 The positive news is that a number of vaccines are now licensed, and vaccination programmes are rolling out across the globe with G7 countries agreeing to distribute their surplus to low-income countries.2
Effects of the pandemic on SRH services
The four countries of the UK have striven to keep sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services in primary care and the community open, but business is not ‘as usual’. Telemedicine and telephone triage/consultations have become the norm. It is no surprise that much less long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) is being fitted and removed in general practice and SRH services as we have struggled with staff sickness, redeployment and strict COVID-19 restrictions. UK prescribing data for 2020 show a 35% drop in the number of implants and a 27% decrease in intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUDs) fitted. Data from 2020 suggest that approximately 121 000 implants were fitted in primary care and 85 000 in community/secondary care compared with 170 000 and 148 000 in 2019. The fitting of copper IUDs …
Footnotes
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.