Commentary Multi-specialty family planning training: collaborating to meet the needs of women Jody Steinauer a, ⁎ , Christine Dehlendorf b , Kevin Grumbach b , Uta Landy a , Philip Darney a a Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, San Francisco General Hospital, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA b Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA Received 15 November 2011; accepted 1 December 2011 1. Introduction The specialty of family medicine is recognized as having an important role in the delivery of family planning services in the United States. Not only do many women receive their contraceptive services from family physicians [1], but there is a growing recognition of the role family physicians can play in ensuring that women have access to safe and timely abortion service [2,3]. Passage of the Affordable Care Act has drawn attention to this role, as increased insurance coverage may result in many women accessing contraceptive care within primary care services, as opposed to using dedicated family planning clinics. As the role of family medicine in family planning increases, the need for family physicians with technical and research expertise in this area also increases. The Fellowship in Family Planning has contributed to developing these experts since its inception, with one of the first fellowship programs—the University of Rochester—training family physicians in contraceptive and abortion care. Subsequently, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine initiated a fellowship site dedicated to training family medicine family planning experts. In addition, several family physicians have received family planning in fellowship training at sites based in Departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology, including at the University of Southern California and Columbia University. While these efforts have increased the number of academic primary care physicians with expertise in family planning, the impact has been limited due to the small number of training opportunities. In addition, until recently, there have been no programs with ongoing experience with training both family medicine and obstetrics/gynecology family planning experts and facilitating collaboration between these specialists in this area. As these two specialties have distinct and complementary roles in family planning, both perspectives are essential components of a health care system which can meet the needs of all women. Enhancing collaboration between these disciplines through multi-specialty training programs has the potential to facilitate coordinated research and training across the range of women's family planning needs. In this commentary, we describe the experience at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) of an integrated training model with both obstetrician/gynecologists and family physicians. This model can enhance the future of family planning research and training, in which both specialties play an integral and complementary role, through increasing the number of family medicine family planning experts as well as expanding the opportunities for and expertise in collabora- tive family planning research and clinical care. 2. UCSF Model UCSF was the first site for the Fellowship in Family Planning, enrolling its first fellow in 1991. Faculty and fellows in the department have been involved in a broad range of family planning research, including having participated in studies leading to the approval of every new form of contraception since 1981 and providing first- and second-trimester abortion care at the Women's Options Contraception 86 (2012) 188 – 190 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: steinauerj@obgyn.ucsf.edu (J. Steinauer). 0010-7824/$ – see front matter © 2012 Published by Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.contraception.2011.12.001