Assessment of Youth-Friendly Postabortion Care Services: A Global Tool for Assessing and Improving Postabortion Care for Youth

This tool is designed to help assessment teams, project managers, supervisors, and providers collect detailed information on the quality of Postabortion Care (PAC) services provided to adolescents at a given facility in order to make services more youth-friendly. It can also be used before PAC services have been established to see how best to design PAC services to meet youth’s needs. The assessment process facilitates the development of action plans for quality improvement that can help facilities address policy, operations, training, and other program areas needing adjustments and change. The tool also provides essential baseline information, allowing for repeated applications to measure changes and the impact of program interventions. Although the tool is primarily for use by a team, it may also be used by an individual.

Essential elements of postabortion care: origins, evolution and future directions

In this comment, we chronicle the development and expansion of a postabortion care model designed to promote interventions that address abortion-related public health concerns even when abortion laws and policies are restrictive. We review years of program experience with the original model, which led to the development of an expanded and updated model, Essential Elements of Postabortion Care (PAC). Implementing the model challenges global public health leaders, donors, technical assistance agencies and ministries of health to work with communities to ensure that all women who want to prevent or space pregnancies can obtain contraceptive services; that all women have access to services to manage complications from abortion, whether induced or spontaneous; and that all women receiving treatment also receive counseling and the reproductive and other health services they need at the treatment visit, as well as follow-up care and contraceptive resupply