KARACHI: A study finds midwives trained under a pilot project helped improve public access to family planning services in Tando Allahyar.

The project also saw greater community-level acceptance and confidence in community midwives as family planning service providers due to their improved counselling skill and ability to tackle family planning issues.

The study was conducted by the Population Council (PC) in collaboration with provincial departments of health and population welfare and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and its findings were shared at a local hotel the other day.

The objective of the research was to examine and identify cost-effective ways of utilising existing health resources to improve women’s rights-based access to family planning services in Sindh, particularly in its rural areas. Presenting key findings of the study, Iram Kamran the Population Council shared that it recorded an increase in community-wide family planning service uptake due to improved outreach.

“Provision of family planning service by trained community midwives also improved due to expanded choice of methods and capacity for delivering postpartum family planning counselling.

Regular contraceptive supplies played a major role in enhancing utilisation of family planning services,” she said.

In her speech, Rehan Iqbal Baloch, provincial secretary of population welfare department, said the government was trying to increase coordination mechanisms between the population welfare and health departments at district level to improve access to family planning services.

During a plenary discussion, Dr Talib Lashari, technical adviser at the population welfare department, briefed the audience about the steps taken to improve the family planning programme.

In her remarks, Bayramgul Garabayeva, provincial representative of UNFPA, reaffirmed the role of the organisation to work with the Pakistan government on evidence-based policy making to strengthen population welfare and health programmes in the country.

Published in Dawn, December 24th, 2021