Sept. 16--By mid-December, the Pueblo City-County Health Department could have a powerful new tool to address the county's growing teen pregnancy rate.
Using a $50,000 grant from the county's Department of Social Services, the health department has hired the JSI Research and Training Institute of Denver to help shed light on why the rate here is so high and what could reduce it.
On Wednesday, more than 100 people gathered for lunch at Pueblo Community College to hear an outline of how the study would be done.
Local health department officials are frustrated that all of the sex education programs in schools and those the department itself offers have failed to stem the rate. They believe Pueblo's problem is uniquely its own and hope the study will show how to address it.
Sarah Ruybalid, the health department's community health services division director, said once the study targets the problem, "we can move ahead with some implementation."
The comparison of data shows the problem.
Colorado's average teen birth rate from 2005 to 2007 was 38.9 per 1,000 females 15-19 years old. During the same period, Pueblo's rate was 57.5 in that age group.
Those numbers are driven by higher rates of sexual activity. A youth risk behavior surveillance survey in 2007 reported that 60 percent of 12th graders surveyed statewide had had sex, while the Pueblo number was 65 percent. Even more telling was that in Pueblo, the percentage of ninth graders was 42 percent, double the rate for Colorado.
Pueblo also has a higher rate of sexually transmitted diseases.
In 2007, for 15-19 year olds, the number for chlamydia was 2,300 per 100,000 here compared to 1,504 statewide. Gonorrhea cases locally amounted to 305 per 100,000 compared to 223 for Colorado.
Yvonne Hamby, JSI's project director, said the study will look at children as young as 13 but would focus on the 15-19 year olds where the problem is the greatest.
The first step will be to develop the targets for key informant interviews, young people who have been successful in avoiding teen pregnancy and those who haven't, asking what behaviors, beliefs and conditions led to each.
The researchers then will move on to focus groups and then come up with best practices that Pueblo agencies can use. Hamby said things that already work need to be encouraged.
"We really want to build upon the successes here," Hamby said.
After the lists of informants and focus groups are drawn up, based in part on survey forms passed out at Wednesday's meeting, JSI will submit its research plan to an institutional review board made up of about four or five experts chosen from universities. Interviews should start in mid-October and focus group sessions in November.
During Wednesday's meeting, Hamby talked about the results of a similar study in Boulder County.
When talking to young women, and the fathers of their children, they avoided the word "accident" and instead talked about unplanned or mistimed pregnancies, she said.
Women and some men also said they paid a lot more attention to birth control afterward.
For most males, however, Hamby said birth control "was not in their mindset" and if they used anything it was more to prevent sexually transmitted disease.
In addition, young women complained that they were told a lot more about contraception by their doctors after they got pregnant. "They said more time should have been spent before," Hamby said. "They said spending five to 10 extra minutes would help to really make sure I'm making a real choice that affects my life and the lifetime of someone else."
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