“Found a golden opportunity to provide education and prevention.”
Pediatrics
Diablo
“Seventy one percent of the girls coming through our clinic were not on the most effective birth control method,” says Dr. Borquez. “It was a golden opportunity for us to provide education and prevention for these girls.”
In the early 1990’s, pediatricians Ximena Borquez, MD and Richard Boise, MD were seeing teens as young as thirteen coming in to the Antioch facility for pregnancy tests. “They would call in for the pregnancy test results… and not receive any further counseling,” says Dr. Boise. “These kids were falling through the cracks.”
The two physicians and their team developed a teen pregnancy test counseling program that was so successful at Antioch, it has been adopted by twenty other facilities with support from Regional Health Education. Now, when a teenager comes in for a pregnancy test, she receives immediate results and face-to-face counseling regarding the decisions she needs to make.
All of the counselors receive specialized training before working with the teens. “If I can help a young teen make good decisions about contraception and STDs, I feel great fulfillment,” said one of the counselors Marylou Goldblatt, LVN.