Promoting youth-friendly health services

Health services in the communities are hostile to adolescents

Each time Plan engages in a discussion with adolescents, we often hear the same story: health services in their communities are hostile to adolescents and young people. The services are for adults, mothers and small children, unmarried adolescents do not visit them.

Adolescents do not have the money to pay for the health services and they often don't trust the confidentiality of the services nor want to obtain the obligatory parental consent to access them. 

Many national programmes use health services to distribute condoms, promote family planning, and provide voluntary testing and counselling for HIV. These are services of specific relevance to adolescents, but they often do not reach them.

Young people participation

Plan works with Ministries of Health, in most countries it works in, to make government health services more inviting and accessible to young people and to ensure that young people take part in defining and planning the services they need. Their participation in shaping their local health services has a major impact on reducing children’s vulnerability to HIV infection.

Voluntary HIV testing and counselling

Voluntary HIV testing and counselling is the starting point for any HIV-related services. Plan believes that the testing services must be linked to an adequate offer of care for those who test positive, at the very least the offer of long-term support through a self-help group in the community. And for those who test negative, the service must be linked to effective reinforcement of protective behaviours. Plan’s support of HIV testing is therefore never an isolated stand-alone issue.

Many Plan programmes actively support the establishment and promotion of facilities for voluntary HIV testing and counselling. And while these services might be based in health facilities in some countries, Plan places particular emphasis on supporting services operated by community-based organisations outside these facilities throughout its programme. Accessibility to voluntary counselling and testing by adolescents and young people is a fundamental key for Plan support.

Where national regulations prohibit testing below a certain age without parental consent, as for instance in Burkina Faso, Plan engages in national advocacy to change the policy.