Designing & Evaluating General Individual Preconception Care

Preconception Care (PCC) entails risk assessment, health promotion, counselling, and intervention. The Dutch Health Council categorized PCC into general PCC targeted at couples planning a pregnancy within the general population, and specialist PCC for couples with a known or predefined risk for an adverse pregnancy outcome. In the Netherlands in 2007, the Health Council advised to integrate general PCC into the health care system. Although PCC is regarded as a promising preventive healthcare approach for prospective parents and the future child, it’s implementation in daily practice is scarce. Several barriers are given, e.g. the discussion of the components of PCC and the limited number of PCC programs which have been evaluated; these have been mainly in secondary and tertiary care. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to gain more insight in the optimal design and implementation of a general PCC program.