Barriers to infertility treatment: an integrated study.

BACKGROUND Infertility is one of the most important events in life. Despite the negative impact of infertility, a significant number of women struggling to conceive do not consult a physician and do not fallow up infertility treatment. This integrated study aimed to investigate a large amount of factors which influenced discontinuation of infertility treatment. METHODS This integrated study (qualitative - quantitative study) was done on infertile women who had referred to infertility center in Jahrom University of medical sciences using purposive sampling. In the first study, data were collected from a valid questionnaire with 22 questions in a 5-point likert scale about barriers to infertility treatments and in the second study, as a phenomenology approach, data collection was done using deep unstructured interviews and focused groups were aimed to identify deep individual experiences about it. RESULTS major barriers to infertility treatments included the probability of treatment failure (52.5%), couple's age and possibility of high risk pregnancy (51.5%), Painfulness of some treatment methods such as laparoscopy (50.5%). Qualitative results led to the identification of three main themes: Nature of treatment, negative thinking, social and cultural factors. CONCLUSION As a result, we suggest family education and enrichment of cultural context in the field of infertility; infertile people would be willing to pursue infertility treatments.