"With someone your own age, you will be serious. You'll feel at ease. With someone older, you don't want to discuss some things, problems, what's in your heart."
Student peer educator in Haiti |
To meet the needs of adolescents, you can consider ways to attract and better serve young people. There are strategies to make services more "youth-friendly."
Youth-friendly programs:
- Actively involve adolescents in program design and service delivery.
- Consider how adolescents' needs differ from those of adults and provide services that specifically meet the needs of young people.
Providing youth-friendly services does not necessarily mean building a new clinic. It can mean adding adolescent-only hours or offering services in places where adolescents congregate, such as youth centers, sporting events or work sites. For community-based workers, it can mean including young people in home visits. And for all health workers, it means establishing or working within a referral network. While family planning/reproductive health programs may not be able to offer all methods and services to young people, they can link with other organizations that offer services to young people, including educational and social service programs.
What you can do: youth-friendly programs
How far you can go to meet the needs of adolescents depends on your resources, interest and motivation.
1. At a minimum, you can and should do the following:
- Involve young people in planning and implementing health services.
- Make all staff receptionists, nurses, physicians aware that they should treat adolescents with respect and dignity.
- Revise clinic policies and procedures that prevent youth from getting services and information. For example, revise age requirements for contraceptive use or requirements that clients must be married.
- Ensure that young clients have privacy and that clinic policies emphasize confidentiality.
- Train staff in counseling techniques and make sure they have the most current information on contraceptives.
- Allow enough time for counseling.
- Develop referral systems. Find out about other services in your community for adolescents. Keep a list of these services readily available.
2. If you have some resources for improving adolescent services, you can also add these components:
- Offer separate services for adolescents and adults.
- Offer services at hours that are convenient for adolescents, such as after school or on weekends.
- Make the clinic attractive to adolescents (bright colors, posters, popular music).
- Offer information and education to young clients, both at the clinic and as part of community outreach. For example, hold education sessions at your clinic at times convenient for adolescents, such as after school, or meet with adolescents at local youth clubs to answer their questions about reproductive health.
- Reduce prices for young clients. Provide services free or based on a sliding scale.
- Involve young people by creating a youth advisory board.
3. Programs with more resources can do more. Possibilities include:
- Advocate to improve national policies and service delivery guidelines for adolescents.
- Develop community outreach programs and off-site clinics held at schools, in factories or on the streets.
- Reach adolescents through educational talks before they need reproductive health services. Target parents, too.
- Train peer educators to provide information, education and certain methods to youth.
- Work with mass media to communicate reproductive health messages. Use billboards, soap operas, videos, radio dramas, comic books, popular songs or plays.
- Create or work with "youth development programs" programs that improve socioeconomic status, such as literacy programs or job training.
- Evaluate your program. Examine quality, gender equity and respect for adolescent rights. Evaluations may include:
- Simple observations.
- Review of clinic statistics to determine if more young people are attending clinics and returning for follow-up visits.
- Collection of data to compare services before and after
- youth-friendly services are implemented.
- Outcome evaluations to assess whether the project met its goals.
General guidelines for all adolescent programs
If you decide to offer services to adolescents, you can take several steps to ensure that programs are effective:
- Identify which specific target groups will be served. The group can be defined by age, school status, marital status or place of residence (urban versus rural).
- Establish specific objectives and indicators to measure whether these objectives were achieved. For example, an objective might be to increase awareness about STIs. An indicator might be that 10 peer educators were trained and then they reached 100 young people with safer sex messages.
- Involve young people in program planning, implementation and evaluation.
- Consider the potential effects of gender, culture and tradition on service delivery.
- Offer short waiting times and welcome drop-in clients.
- Welcome boys and develop programs targeting them.
To be successful, you also may need to consider approaches to service delivery that involve the community, such as:
- Peer motivators and educators.
- Contraceptive information at schools, sports events, youth clubs, concerts or other places where young people congregate.
- A parents' day at the clinic to provide information to adults about adolescents' reproductive health needs.
- A young people's day at the clinic to provide information about good health. Children of all ages, not just adolescents, could be invited.
- Community feedback sessions to solicit ideas from young people about the types of health services they want, their satisfaction with current services and their ideas for changes and improvements.
The key to providing quality services for adolescents is to treat clients with courtesy and dignity. Above all, young people who seek reproductive health information and services deserve respect.
Questions for Providers and Program Managers about Youth-friendly Programs |
|
? What can you do to make reproductive health information and services more accessible, attractive or convenient to youth? How can you make your clinic or program more youth-friendly?
? Among the three levels of improvements outlined in this section, which can your clinic or program undertake now?
? Which specific activities in this section can you implement to improve adolescent services?
? What creative activities can you undertake to ensure that services and information reach more young people?
? How can you work with parents and other adults in your community to help them understand the unique reproductive health needs of adolescents?
? How will you evaluate your clinic or program to determine whether it is meeting the needs of adolescents? |
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