In Seine-Saint-Denis, future fathers have the opportunity to have a check-up on their state of health.
- Between January 2021 and April 2022, all fathers of unborn children at Montreuil hospital (Seine-Saint-Denis) were offered a prenatal consultation.
- This prenatal consultation addresses prevention, screening, access to rights, catch-up vaccinations and referral to primary care.
- “Overall support for the prenatal consultation offered to all fathers is high,” note those responsible for the project today.
Established in 2021 in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis), a prenatal consultation offered to all fathers of unborn children was a great success. An initiative to replicate?
“In France as elsewhere, healthy men have less contact with the health system than women. Gynecological and obstetrical follow-up provides women with opportunities for preventive consultations which have no equivalent for men, including understood when couples are expecting a child”, explains Doctor Pauline Penot, at the origin of the experiment.
“The objective of the Partage project was to evaluate the level and determinants of acceptance of a prenatal prevention consultation dedicated to future fathers”, she adds.
Between January 2021 and April 2022, all fathers of unborn children at Montreuil hospital (Seine-Saint-Denis) were offered a prenatal consultation covering prevention, screening, access to rights, catch-up vaccination and referral to primary care, subject to the prior consent of their spouse to transmit their contact details.
44% of men eligible for prenatal consultation came
Results: 3,038 women (80% of eligible women) provided contact details that allowed them to contact their spouses. 53% of men with whom effective contact was established came to the male prenatal consultation.
Another observation made by Pauline Penot’s team: the rate of adherence of immigrants to prenatal consultation was higher than that of future fathers born in France (56% vs. 49%).“It was particularly high among the most precarious immigrants (those who arrived on French soil for less than seven years, originating from poor regions of the world, without the right to stay)”, can we read in the report. “In multivariate analysis, men born in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia were almost twice as likely to take up the offer as those born in Europe or North America,” also indicates the text.
“Overall adherence to the prenatal consultation offered to fathers is high”
“Overall adherence to the prenatal consultation offered to all fathers is high,” say scientists with hindsight. “This consultation was particularly popular with the most vulnerable immigrants who saw it as an opportunity to integrate the system,” they conclude.
The André Grégoire hospital center, the Population and Development Center (Ceped), the Research Institute for Development (IRD), the University of Paris and Inserm collaborated on the experiment presented in this article.
