Senegalese Nurses Trained to Offer Women More Contraceptive Options

Dec 17, 2010

Over the past year, the Maternal, Neonatal, and Child Health/Family Planning and Malaria Project has trained 181 nurses in rural health posts across Senegal to offer long-term contraceptive methods, such as intrauterine devices and contraceptive implants. This groundbreaking approach will make contraceptives more widely available, and offer Senegalese women more contraceptive options. In Bagadadji, a rural town in southeastern Senegal, this work is already showing results: family planning prevalence has nearly doubled since nurses have been trained to offer long-term methods.

In the past, Senegal’s national policies dictated that nurses could only provide short-term contraceptives such as birth control pills, condoms, and spermicides. Rural health posts—the most widely used health facilities nationally—are largely staffed by nurses, and therefore were not providing long-term methods. Women who wanted these forms of contraception often needed to travel long distances to get them. Now, the Reproductive Health Division of the Ministry of Health is only training nurses in long-term methods in health posts that meet certain criteria (such as having running water and electricity).

The national policy is also being revised to make it possible for nurses to officially offer a wider range of contraceptive choices at more health facilities. This work is an important step toward decreasing unmet need for family planning in a country where it is estimated that only 10% of married women use contraception.   

The Maternal, Neonatal, and Child Health/Family Planning and Malaria Project is led by IntraHealth International and funded by USAID.


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1 Comment(s)

  1. Posted by Lauri Romanzi, MD on Dec 21, 2010

    Creating supply only works when there is demand. Dire poverty does not create demand for contraceptive services, it decreases it, in part because poverty leads to high death rates for newborns and infants. Women living in a community where babies die young don't want to do anything to impair the ability to conceive more children. According to Populations Reference Bureau, the 2008 infant mortality in Senegal was 58/1000 live births, equivalent to Tanzania, and far below the highest, in Afghanistan, at 155/1000 live births (www.prb.org). I do hope that this intermediate infant mortality ranking reflects ongoing programs to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality, without which a rejection of this national contraceptive outreach program by the women it hopes to serve is virtually certain. That said, well done! When it comes to family planning, nothing is possible without short and long term contraceptive methods.