Postpartum and Postabortion Patients Want Family Planning

According to this 2-page summary paper published by the Frontiers in Reproductive Health at the Population Council, "when providers at five Honduran hospitals were trained to provide family planning counseling and methods to postpartum and postabortion women, the proportion of women receiving this information doubled, and the proportion who received a method tripled."

In 1999 the Honduran Ministry of Health (MOH) and the Population Council began a two-year project to expand access to family planning (FP)counseling and methods following childbirth or treatment for incomplete abortion. According to the authors, although approximately half of deliveries in Honduras take place in hospitals they rarely offer family planning services to postpartum or postabortion patients.

"The intervention consisted of: (1) training all staff members assisting postpartum and postabortion women in FP service promotion and counseling; (2)training 65 physicians and nurses in contraceptive methodology; (3) providing FP methods, equipment, and educational aids such as pamphlets, videos, and flipcharts; and (4) supervising and monitoring activities. At each hospital, project progress was documented through quarterly collection of service statistics and through baseline (474 postpartum and 24 postabortion cases) and endline (571 postpartum and 71 postabortion cases) surveys. In addition,hospital staff conducted quarterly surveys of patients (an average of 238 postpartum women and 26 postabortion women)."

The findings include:

• More postpartum and postabortion women received FP methods and information;
• More women asked for an FP method and most of these women received a method. The intervention led to a major reduction in the proportion of postpartum and postabortion women who requested a method but did not receive it
• "The mix of methods chosen became more diverse during the intervention. Postpartum women shifted from almost exclusive reliance on the IUD and voluntary sterilization to greater use of temporary methods such as condoms andlactational amenorrhea. Postabortion women shifted from voluntary sterilization to a mix of sterilization, injectables, or oral contraceptives."

Based on the success of this intervention model at the five hospitals, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provided support to EngenderHealth for the continued expansion of the model to five more hospitals in Honduras.

Click here to download this summary paper in PDF format.