Postpartum family planning (PPFP) can accelerate reductions in child mortality, but while more than 90 percent of postpartum women in developing countries desire to space or limit a subsequent pregnancy, some 61 percent are not using a family planning method.
The Leadership, Management & Governance (LMG) and Evidence to Action (E2A) projects studied the effect of combining a leadership development program with clinical training to improve postpartum family planning services. Study results indicate that training a clinical cadre of health workers is necessary, but that it alone may not be sufficient for them to apply the skills to real-life workplace challenges, and that leadership and management training could help bridge that gap.
Key findings of the study include:
- Statistically significant increases in the number of women who received counseling during antenatal and postnatal care when hospital teams were trained on both the LDP+ and clinical trainings, compared to hospitals receiving only the clinical training
- Findings suggest that improving health workers’ capacity to lead and manage change may help to resolve barriers to service delivery improvements through improved staff attitudes, documentation, teamwork, and participatory problem solving
Find all of the study results and learn more about the methodology in the Cameroon PPFP Study Endline Report or in the Cameroon Study Research Brief.
LDP+ Technical Report Now Available
Learn more about the LMG Project’s approach to leadership development in our new technical report How the LDP+ Contributes to Behavior Change and Improved Service Delivery: Scaling up the LDP+ and making its use sustainable. This report showcases three recent LDP+ implementations, including the collaboration with the E2A Project in Cameroon, that contributed to service delivery improvements, behavior changes, and scale up.