Monthly Archives: July 2012

Guest post: Oying Rimon, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Impatient Optimists

Around the world, frontline health workers are often the first link to lifesaving care and supplies, and in some cases they are the only link for families and communities in rural and impoverished areas. This is also where most of the world’s unmet need for family planning resides. More than 200 million women in developing countries want to delay or avoid pregnancy but lack access to modern methods of contraception.

Family planning and frontline health workers: worth the investment

In just a few short weeks, the foundation, together with the UK government and other partners, will host the London Summit on Family Planning. It will be a groundbreaking global convening of developed and developing country government and civil society leaders, who will pledge to address the contraceptive needs of an additional 120 million women in the world’s poorest countries by 2020. The summit will also focus on tackling cultural barriers to contraception and encourage countries to adopt a rights-based approach, which enables women to decide whether, when, and how many children to have. At the foundation, we often talk about how frontline health workers and family planning are extremely cost-effective strategies to save lives, and improve health and development broadly. For instance, every three seconds a child’s life is saved thanks to the care provided by a frontline worker (PDF), who can be provided basic training for as little as $300 (U.S.). Likewise, investing in family planning services has a proven cost-benefit return for both developing and developed country governments, and addressing current unmet contraceptive need could prevent one in three maternal deaths and one in four infant deaths.

A personal connection

For me, frontline health workers are not just a smart investment, but also a community I feel personally committed to. Back in the 1970s, one of my first jobs was as manager of a national family planning program in my native country of the Philippines, which included more than 4,500 outreach workers and 50,000 community-based volunteers providing information and services to couples in their neighborhoods. I met with many of these highly committed community-based workers and saw first-hand how crucial a role they played for the country’s population, nearly half of which resides in urban slums.

In the Philippines, this first-string of health providers, mostly midwives and barangay (village) health workers, fills the gaps of an overwhelmed healthcare system and provides critical health. As of 2012, contraception use in the country, which is 80 percent Catholic, is just 34 percent. Yet current political leadership is committed to bringing family planning services closer to the people. Recently, I was on a personal visit there and was pleasantly surprised to see many of the same individuals I used to know, still working for their communities–although many now qualify for senior citizen discounts!

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Guest Post: by Laura Hoemeke, IntraHealth International

During last year’s International Conference on Family Planning, IntraHealth promoted health worker empowerment with the slogan “Family Planning: It Takes a Health Worker.” We had the phrase printed on posters and buttons, proudly displayed at our booth and on our lapels. We posited that all of the contraceptive technologies in the world will not make a difference if there are not skilled health workers to deliver them. Visitors to our booth, seeing our theme, sometimes laughed and said, “Well, technically it doesn’t take a health worker to put on a condom or promote abstinence.”

Health worker with supplies in a clinic near Dakar, Senegal.

During the conference, I responded — and continue to assert — that it does take a health worker, or more accurately millions of health workers, to meet the need that hundreds of millions of couples worldwide have for family planning. It takes a health worker not only to administer most modern methods of contraception but also to provide counseling and services in a holistic way, and to offer reproductive and other health services throughout the life cycle of both women and men.

A new report issued by the Guttmacher Institute and UNFPA this week, Adding It Up: Costs and Benefits of Contraceptive Services—Estimates for 2012, supports that notion. Guttmacher and UNFPA released the report in preparation for next month’s Family Planning Summit to be held on July 11 in London with the support of the Government of the United Kingdom and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The summit aims to mobilize new partners and more resources to address family planning needs, especially in the developing world. Labor — or salaries of health workers — currently accounts for an estimated $0.7 billion of the $4 billion spent on family planning in developing countries in 2012, but we need to invest more, globally, to ensure that health workers are there to expand access and offer services. At IntraHealth, we truly hope that the summit also will focus on the need for health workers — not only in numbers but also in training, deployment, and ongoing support.

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