Making Health Services Adolescent Friendly: Developing National Quality Standards for Adolescent Friendly Health Services

This guidebook sets out the public health rationale for making it easier for adolescents to obtain the health services that they need to protect and improve their health and well-being, including sexual and reproductive health services. It defines ‘adolescent-friendly health services’ from the perspective of quality and provides step-by-step guidance on developing quality standards for health service provision to adolescents. It is also designed to take into account the national epidemiological, social, cultural, and economic realities and provides guidance on identifying what actions need to be taken to assess whether appropriate standards have been achieved. It includes communication aspects of making health services respectful, friendly, and confidential.

The guidebook is intended to be a companion to the Quality Assessment Guidebook: A Guide to Assessing Health Services for Adolescent Clients, which was published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2009. These two guidebooks are part of a set of tools to standardise and scale up the coverage of quality health services to adolescents.

The current publication is intended for national public health programme managers and individuals in organisations supporting their work. Its focus is on managers working in the government sector and those working in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and in the commercial sector.