Contraceptive use patterns, prior source, and pregnancy history of female family planning patients: United States, 1980.

a According to data from the 1980 National Reporting System for Family Planning Services, an estimated 4,977,000 women visited an organized family planning clinic in the United States at least once during the survey year. This represents ahnost a 15 percent increase over the number of women who received medical services from family planning clinics in the previous year.1 Using data from this survey, the report looks at the contraceptive use patterns and pregnancy status of women during the time they visited an organized family planning clinic in 1980. The National Reporting System for Family Plan­ ning Services (NRSFPS) is a sample survey conducted the Division of Health Care Statistics of the ional Center for Health Statistics. It was begun in 2 for the purpose of collecting information on visits to clinics for medical family planning services in the United States and its territories. These services are set up under a variety of administrative auspices, which include local health departments, public and private hospitals, and voluntary organizations such as Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., community groups, and neighborhood health centers. Medical family planning visits to private physicians' offices are excluded from the survey. In the survey, a family planning patient is defined as a woman who made a visit for medical family planning services related to contraception, infertility treatment, or sterilization. The overwhelming major­ ity of patients are patients seeking methods of contraception. Persons seeking only pregnancy or venereal disease tests are not counted as family planning patients, nor are persons interested only in obtaining contraceptive supplies (that is, diaphragm, foam, jelly, cream. or condom) or counseling. The Clinic Visit Record (CVR) is the basic form used to collect data from the family planning patients in the National Reporting System for Family Plan­ ning Services. The 14 items on the Clinic Visit Record ver basic sociodemographic information about the ient and other questions pertaining to family ning. Other data in this report are based on information obtained either by observation, from medical records, or, in those clinics that collect data through participation in a computerized record sys­ tem, from locally developed forms that contain the CVR items. Although the primary sampling unit in NRSFPS is the family planning visit, an unduplicated count of patients is obtained by identifying each new patient at her fust visit and each continuation and readmis­ sion patient at her first visit in the survey …