Strengthen the Quality of Services and Systems

One of the primary aims of the ACQUIRE Project’s technical assistance was to strengthen the quality of reproductive health (RH) and family planning (FP) services and systems. At the service delivery level, this entailed a steady focus on the fundamentals of care—informed choice, medical safety, and ongoing quality improvement. These fundamentals require the sustained support of several service delivery subsystems: training, supervision, logistics, and referral. Therefore, ACQUIRE devoted much of its effort to developing resources to strengthen these subsystems and to applying them in country programs to improve service quality. The emphasis on improved quality—associated with greater satisfaction and use—of RH/FP services was central to ACQUIRE’s programming approach and to its Program Model. Quality client-provider interactions are at the core of the model, since ensuring a positive experience at the point of contact between the individual and the health care system is both the means and the end to the broader program goal of delivering more services to more people in more places.

This section of the archive contains a range of state-of-the-art resources helpful for policy makers, program leaders, managers, trainers, supervisors, and providers involved in the planning, design, development, implementation, and/or evaluation of quality RH/FP services. ACQUIRE developed and used these resources at both the global and the country (field) levels to help achieve our programmatic goal and objectives. Among these resources, you will find  ACQUIRE’s curricula for facilitative supervision and for family planning counseling and its Programming for Training Resource Package. These comprehensive resources contain information, methods, tools, suggested approaches, and best practices for these systems and functions, which are vital to the provision of quality services. Other documents in this section synthesize ACQUIRE’s approaches to expanding access to services for long-acting and permanent FP methods (LAPMs) and integrating FP and AIDS services in Uganda according to a “whole-district approach”; training a range of providers in Bolivia in cross-cultural considerations that often impede quality of and access to services; and assessing alternative strategies in Ghana for intrauterine device (IUD) service provision and their respective costs and effectiveness.

Two other IUD-related resources present the latest epidemiological and medical evidence about the IUD’s safety and efficacy across a wide range of client categories and clinical situations: the latest World Health Organization guidance based on this evidence; and the factors operative in medical settings that foster or impede receptivity to change, specifically to the provision of quality IUD (and other LAPM) services. This section is rounded out by two resources focusing on the fundamentals of care, which are the sine qua non of quality facility-based/clinical RH/FP service provision and which underpinned all of ACQUIRE’s work.