In Kenya, Women Treated Well by Their Family Planning Provider Are More Likely to Use Modern Methods

According to “Quality of Care and Contraceptive Use in Urban Kenya,” by Katherine Tumlinson, formerly of the Carolina Population Center, et al., providers’ interactions with family planning clients may play an important role in whether those clients adopt or continue contraceptive use. Of the numerous measures of service quality that the researchers examined, only four were associated with a woman’s adoption of a modern method of contraception: having a provider who asked about her preferred method, helped her choose a method, explained the side effects of that method or treated her “very well.” These results, the researchers argue, suggest that improvements in contraceptive services—particularly in assistance with method selection and treatment of clients—have the potential to increase modern method use in Kenya.