By Sylvia Udegbunam Enugu
Family planning supervisors and monitoring and evaluation officers from the 17 local government areas of Enugu State have been trained on family planning indicators for improved reporting and empathy counselling for increased uptake of DMPA – SC (Depot Medroxyprogesterone Acetate – Subcutaneous) self-injection in the state.
The training programme, which was part of the Delivering Innovations in Self-Care (DISC) project in the state, was organised by the Society for Family Health (SFH) with a focus on strenghtening state level data processes.
The project, which is funded by the Children Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), was being implemented in partnership with Population Services International, the Enugu State Ministry of Health and the Enugu State Primary Health Care Development Agency.
Speaking at the event in Enugu, the Social and Behaviour Communication Coordinator, in the Society for Family Health, Michael Titus, explained that the objective of the DISC project was to scale up quality self care options in sexual reproductive health, especially starting with (DMPSC).
“This product is a family planning method that women can adopt, and it is primarily a self care product that the woman can inject by herself and take care of unplanned pregnancy for three months.
“What it does for the woman just like the other pills, is, instead of the woman using the oral pills daily. she will self inject the drug once and she is safe for the next three months. It also means that instead of her to be going to the facility to be injected every three months; once she has been trained by a health provider, she will take her destiny in her hands and be able to self inject on her own in her home, office or anywhere. Even when she is not around to get to the health care provider, she can still go to the pharmacy to buy and then self inject herself and be safe.
“What it does is that it reduces the number of times she goes to the facility, it saves time of waiting in the facility where we have women working and cannot afford to leave their work to go and wait within the period”.
Titus noted that part of the training was to ensure that there are quality services in public health facilities “such that our women when they get to the facility, they get quality services and then again this leads to quality data also. I noticed that accross the country, there are issues to understand some of the family planning indicators, we found out that new entrance into the family planning space leadership, that some of them has not been trained.
“Therefore this meeting has the purpose to train them to understand the family planning indicators in their register and their working summary tools, also ensuring that data reported in the facility gets to the national data platform, which can be viewed at the State level and nationally”.
During a presentation, the Social and Behavioural Change Communication officer on the DISC project for Enugu State, Mrs Loveth Omeje- Ugwuanyi stated that this was an opportunity for the State to internalize the basic components of the DISC Implementation in Enugu State.
Ugwuanyi listed the basic components to include: Demand Generation- Above the Line; Demand Generation- Below the line; Service Delivery and commodity security; Integrated Supervisory Support Visits and Coordination.
Two of the participants, Ikechukwu Nwangwu, the state monitoring and evaluation officer at state primary health care development agency and Amarachukwu Nnaji, family planning supervisor, Udi Local Government Area, expressed happiness at the training, saying that it had helped them in the issues data entering and posting.
They promised to improve their reporting and coverage rate on family planning and reproductive health across the state.
