Quality of Care
General Quality of Care

2007

• HIV and AIDS
  Examining the Rollout of Pediatric Antiretroviral Treatment in South Africa
  “We are grossly undersupplying antiretroviral drugs to children, and our prevention of mother-to-child transmission program is not working at this site. As a result children are dying in hoards,” explained one doctor who was interviewed as part of a study of pediatric HIV treatment in South Africa. While not all the findings were as grim as the one just quoted, the studies revealed significant deficiencies in pediatric HIV treatment in South Africa.

• Reproductive Health
  Focused Antenatal Care Acceptable, Tricky to Implement
  Appropriate antenatal care is a key element of programs to improve the health of mothers and newborns. Recently the Population Council and partners studied antenatal care in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. These investigations showed that a focused approach, emphasizing quality of care over quantity, is acceptable but can be difficult to implement because of scarce resources and staff turnover.

2005

• Experimental Programs
  Expanding a Successful Health Care Initiative
  What is the best way to help institutions replace poorly functioning policies and programs with ones that have been shown to work well? “In Ghana, we are taking mechanisms that work for individual behavior change and adapting them for the purpose of policy and program change within institutions,” says Population Council demographer James F. Phillips. Phillips and his Council colleagues are collaborating with the Ghana Health Service to help that organization overcome the gap between research and action.

2004

• Family Planning
  Review Finds Scarce Documentation on Quality-of-Care Efforts
  In 1990, the Population Council’s Judith Bruce, now director of the Gender, Family, and Development program, developed a framework for studying quality of care in family planning service delivery and listed its key dimensions. This tool provided a means for researchers to determine what factors hindered or advanced the provision of high-quality care. Since that time, family planning program managers and providers have instituted changes intended to improve quality, and many believe that a good deal is known about the effect of such changes on client satisfaction and behavior. A review of the available research on this topic by Council program associate Saumya RamaRao and Raji Mohanam of Embryon, Inc. has revealed that there are, in fact, few rigorous experimental studies of quality-of-care interventions.

2003

• Quality of Care
  Improved Care Increases Contraceptive Use
  Improving family planning services provided at health facilities can significantly increase contraceptive use and continuation rates according to a recent study completed by Population Council researchers and collaborators. Known as the Davao project, the investigation is one of four field studies being undertaken under the Impact Studies Program, designed to document the feasibility of improving quality of care and the effect of improved quality on women’s reproductive behavior.

2002

• Quality of Care
  Improving Provider–Client Interactions in the Philippines
  At a Population Council workshop, program managers and researchers from the Davao del Norte province of the Philippines stated that a large proportion of family planning clients in their region discontinued contraceptive use. They identified inadequate dialogue between clinician and client as a key source of this behavior. As part of the Population Council’s Impact Studies project researchers looked at ways to enhance provider communication skills in the Philippines. Council researchers assessed the effects of these interventions by comparing experimental clinics with control clinics.

2001

• Planificación Familiar
  Estudio sobre decisión informada en clínicas de Perú
  Para que las usuarias de planificación familiar (PF) puedan tomar decisiones informadas respecto de los métodos anticonceptivos, los proveedores necesitan determinar qué desean sus pacientes y ofrecerles una selección adecuada; más aún, deben proporcionarles información detallada sobre los posibles efectos secundarios de los métodos e indicarles cómo usar el de su elección. Se ha demostrado que en varios países, incluyendo Perú, no siempre se cumple con estos requerimientos.

1996

• Informe del Campo
  Medición del impacto de la calidad de la atención en Perú
  Mejorar la calidad de los servicios de planificación familiar (PF), independientemente del impacto demográfico que ello conlleva, es un esfuerzo que promueven ampliamente los especialistas en población. Pero no se sabe aún si servicios de mejor calidad aumentan la prevalencia anticonceptiva y reducen la fecundidad no deseada.

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