Family planning and sexual health: Understanding the needs of South Asian women in Glasgow

Abstract

This study enabled South Asian women living in Glasgow to discuss the constraints on their use of family planning services. Semi‐structured interviews were completed with 20 South Asian women. The results show that only a minority of women experience linguistic barriers to contraceptive service use. The South Asian visitors to the clinic who were interviewed identified few barriers to their own service use but described other groups of South Asian women as unable to access family planning services because of lack of information about existing services, little knowledge of sexual health issues and embarrassment in sexual health consultations. The groups identified by the interviewees as experiencing these constraints were women who had recently immigrated and unmarried South Asian women although none of the respondents belonged to these groups. The implications of these findings for service providers are considered particularly with regard to the claim of some groups within a community to speak for others. The importance of locally specific data for planning services is discussed in addition to difficulties related to responding to this information which is often contradictory.