Smart patient, smart community: improving client participation in family planning consultations through a community

Young Mi Kim1, Eva Bazant, J Douglas Storey

  • 1Center for Communication Programs, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD 21202, USA. ykim@jhuccp.org

In health care consultations, patients often receive insufficient information from providers and communicate little with providers about their needs or concerns. This study evaluated a combined community education and mass media intervention to improve clients' participation in family planning consultations. A household survey was conducted with 1,200 women in three sub-districts (two intervention and one control) of West Java province in Indonesia. A comparison of post-campaign findings among family planning clients suggests that the intervention as a whole had a positive effect on client participation, specifically the number of clients who prepared questions to ask the service provider prior to a family planning visit in the past year. Multivariate analyses showed that the "Smart Card" intervention and elements of the "Sahabat" (Friend) mass media campaign were positively associated with clients' preparation of questions and question asking behavior during family planning consultations, indicating that a combined community education and mass-media approach can improve client communication with providers and improve the quality of family planning counseling.

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