Population Council Research that makes a difference

Researchers with the Population Council's FRONTIERS program collaborated with the Maternal, Child and Women's Health and Nutrition cluster of the South Africa Department of Health to provide programmatic guidance on how to make counseling and testing for HIV more widely available through family planning services and on the most feasible and effective ways of doing this. The study's objective was to determine whether educating family planning clients about voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) for HIV within routine family planning visits is more acceptable than referring clients for specialized VCT services. Researchers compared two models of VCT integration in terms of the quality of family planning services, the intention to use VCT, and the cost per family planning client. The study also evaluated the effectiveness of the more feasible model with respect to uptake of VCT and use of dual protection by family planning clients.