Skip to main content

BMC reproductive health: family planning global conference series

Editorial

Despite known benefits of modern contraception and family planning, especially in protecting the health of women and asserting their reproductive rights, more than 225 million women around the globe have an unmet need for wanting to avoid an unintended pregnancy [1]. Family planning could prevent up to 30 % of the more than 287,000 maternal deaths that take place globally every year [2], with low and middle income countries accounting for up to 99 % of the deaths.

The global conference series: International Family Planning Conference, first launched in Uganda in 2009, brought focus to research that is required to guide contraceptive method mix, improve quality of care, expand contraceptive access, family planning programming and coverage, as well as aid the development of new methods to meet the evolving needs of both new and current users. The subsequent 2012 London Family Planning Summit and its follow-on Family Planning 2020 initiative, further renewed impetus on family planning, with high-level policymaking buy-in. At this Summit, significant global and national commitments were made. These global developments require complementary scientific endeavour that can inform policy formulation and family planning program development or strengthening. A platform dedicated to sharing state of the art research ensures a scientific and policy environment that is responsive to critical elements for sustainable development. Implementation science research further ensures the identification of barriers to contraceptive method uptake and elaboration of factors associated with method switching or discontinuation.

Improving quality of care in family planning service delivery for example, through accessible expanded method-mix, as well as the training and wider distribution of providers, e.g. through skilled community distributors, as part of task shifting [35] are among key determinates of improving contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR). The premise that underpins increasing CPR is that improved quality of family planning services, e.g., through widening contraceptive choice, providing full information and counseling, based on plausible research findings, and client satisfaction with method, are among key determinants of contraceptive uptake and method use continuation. Full contraceptive access also requires provision of services to women across the reproductive lifespan, from adolescents to adulthood. The papers presented in this thematic series reflect a focus on some of these important considerations.

This series collates some of the papers presented during the 2013 International Family Planning Conference, which was attended by over 3,500 researchers, program implementers, policy makers, advocates, youth leaders and media and representatives of local and international organizations from 110 countries. The conference reflected on the theme “Full Access, Full Choice” to life saving Family Planning information, supplies and service. The papers presented all have the objective of responding to the contraceptive needs of the millions of women which in some instances, is a matter of survival or death.

These responses can take a variety of approaches, including harnessing mobile health technology to support family planning access in Cambodia (Smith et al. [6]), and assessing feasibility of contraceptive service integration into the workload of community health workers in Rwanda (Chin Quee et al. [7]). Understanding women’s fertility desires and contraceptive needs, as explored among women in 3 peri-urban communities in sub-Saharan Africa (OlaOlorun et al. [8]), is an important component in the evolution of successful family planning programs. And we must understand the contraceptive needs of women at all stages of reproductive life, which reflect a growing recognition of the importance of youth- and adolescent-friendly reproductive health services as espoused in an analysis of data from 8 low- and middle-income countries in the paper by Chandra-Mouli et al. [9]. These studies are part of the global to effort to advance sexual and reproductive health through, among other things, appropriately addressing the wider contraceptive needs of women and couples throughout the reproductive life span.

References

  1. Sing S, Darroch JE, Ashford LS. Adding it up: The cost and benefits of investing in sexual and reproductive health 2014”. New York: Guttmacher Institute; 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  2. WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA. The World Bank and the United Nations Population Division. Trends in Maternal Mortality: 1990 to 2013. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  3. MC Poke B, Mensoh K. Task Shifting in Health Care in resource-poor countries. Lancet. 2008;372(9642):870–1.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Sing P, Sachs TD. 1 Million Community Health Workers in sub-Sahara Africa by 2015. Lancet. 2013;382(9887):363–5.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. World Health Organization (WHO). Task Shifting: rational redistribution of tasks among health workforce teams: Global recommendations and guidelines. WHO. Geneva 2008. Accessed http://www.who.int/healthsystems/TTR-TaskShifting.pdf.

  6. Smith C, Vannak U, Sokhey L, Ngo TD, Gold J, Free C. Mobile Technology for Improved Family Planning (MOTIF): the development of a mobile phone-based (mHealth) intervention to support post-abortion family planning (PAFP) in Cambodia. BMC Repro Health (issue details needed).

  7. Chin-Quee D, Mugeni C, Nkunda D, Uwizeye MR, Stockton LL, Wesson J. Balancing workload, motivation and job satisfaction in Rwanda: assessing the effect of adding family planning service provision to community health worker duties. BMC Repro Health (issue details needed).

  8. OlaOlorun F, Seme A, Otupiri E, Ogunjuyigbe P, Tsui A. Do Women's Fertility Desires Influence Contraceptive Behavior?: Findings from Three Peri-urban Communities in Sub Saharan Africa. BMC Repro Health (issue details needed).

  9. Chandra-Mouli V, Chatterjee S, Bose K. Do efforts to standardize, assess and improve the quality of health service provision to adolescents by government-run health services in low and middle income countries, lead to improvements in service-quality and service-utilization by adolescents? BMC Repro Health (issue details needed).

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anne Burke.

Additional information

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Authors’ contributions

MTM and AB both drafted and edited the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Mbizvo, M.T., Burke, A. BMC reproductive health: family planning global conference series. Reprod Health 13, 9 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12978-016-0116-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12978-016-0116-1