4 Questions About Family Planning: An Interview with Dr. Gwendolyn Morgan
Dr. Gwendolyn (Gwen) Morgan is the Deputy Director of the Evidence to Action (E2A) project.
What are the most critical family planning (FP) issues today?
- Ensuring that women who want family planning (FP) can access it and have a range of options to choose from (and ensuring that commodities are available and supply, management, and stocking systems are effective)
- Ensuring that women receive the best quality of care and counselling on their preferred method
- Integrating messages and services into as many points of service delivery as possible
- Engaging communities and incorporating messages and activities around gender issues, male engagement, and couples communication in demand generation activities
- Expanding FP services to youth and young married women and men, as well as older women who want to stop having children.
What are global health leaders doing to address these issues?
Global health leaders have played a critical coordination, funding, and advocacy role in a variety of ways, including supporting availability of commodities, supporting programs and countries with funding and technical assistance to improve FP service delivery, and supporting countries with policies and costed implementation plans, with a focus on the FP2020 goals of increased access to FP for women around the world. Countries themselves have the biggest role to play in terms of making needed improvements to health services, ensuring the availability of trained providers, equipment, and commodities, and engaging in planning exercises to leverage resources and ensure good coverage and access for all women, even the poor.
How can health systems strengthening (HSS) improve family planning efforts?
Health Systems Strengthening (HSS) is the key to improving availability and quality of FP and scaling up strong programs, as opposed to introducing and supporting a specific technical innovation. The foundation for effective scaling up of innovations in family planning programs is institutional capacity building and strengthening through effective management practices and leadership at all levels of the health system and government.
What advice would you give to health leaders who are working in family planning?
Family planning is one of the top-10 greatest and most cost-effective public health achievements of the 20th century. According to an article by John Cleland, family-planning promotion is unique among medical interventions in terms of its potential benefits: reduction of poverty, and maternal and child mortality; empowerment of women by lightening the burden of excessive childbearing, improved environmental sustainability, and improved marital and family relationships. By improving access to high quality FP services, you as health leaders have so much impact on all these different aspects of health, environmental, family, and social well-being.
How would you address the issue of cultural and religious influence on Family planning, some religions and cultures do not believe in family planning practices which turns into stumbling block to the implementers. take an example of my country Uganda, some tribes and religions have constitutional rights to refuse these family planning actions like safe male circumcision.
Family planning is paramount to the development of any nation. Male engagement is an important issue too. Male have a very big influence in family planning, as heads of families, as husbands and as people who can practice family planning themselves (circumcision and vasectomy).
Therefore if we start this initiative by educating men and then women, the initiative will be successful. Community teams is another group that can influence the use and access of family planning initiatives.