Patient-centered infertility care from an Arab perspective: A review study

Background

Patient-centeredness was listed as the sixth quality element by the Institute of Medicine in 2001. Cultural differences should be acknowledged when defining patient-centeredness. Although there are numerous sources of literature that studied patient-centered infertility care, few include members of the Arab population.

Objectives

This review aims to answer two questions: What do Arab patients prefer, value, and expect from infertility medical care? How was patient-centered infertility care studied in Arab patients?

Search strategy

A systematic search was conducted on seven electronic databases published up until March 2017.

Selection criteria

Studies evaluated the infertile patients' preferences and expectations concerning infertility care. Participants were Arab patients who sought care for infertility. The outcome was patient-centered infertility care.

Data collection and analysis

The reviewers carried out data extraction of specific outcomes and evaluated each study using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool.

Main results

A total of 629 citations were identified. However, only 6 were eligible for analysis. All studies were monocentric. All but one of them were quantitative. The patient-centered care outcome measures in most of the studies were respect for patients’ preferences and/or physical comfort concerning a specified diagnostic or therapeutic intervention. Only one study explored patients’ experiences and found that emotional support, information, communication, education, and coordination and integration of care were appreciated dimensions.

Conclusions

We found that no study comprehensively described what infertile Arab couples prefer, need, and value. A contributing factor to this conclusion may be in the methodologies used. Further studies are needed to adequately answer the research questions.