USAID Supports the Integration of Family Planning
and HIV Care and Treatment Services

Family Health International (FHI) and partners are working with Kenya’s Ministry of Health (MOH) to incorporate the family planning needs of women with HIV into a new national strategy for integrating reproductive health and HIV care and treatment services. The collaborators are also developing a provider orientation package that will be rolled out with the new strategy later this year. USAID is supporting both activities.

The strategy and orientation package will include detailed information on how health care providers can integrate services by systematically interviewing HIV-infected women about their fertility desires and by offering appropriate contraceptive options to women on antiretroviral therapy (ART). As availability and access to ART rapidly expands, providers need to be able to understand and address the comprehensive health care needs of women and couples who are taking these drugs or may soon be eligible to take them.

The impetus for this work is USAID-supported research documenting a substantial unmet need for contraception among HIV-infected women and limited family planning services available to clients of a comprehensive care center in Nakuru, Rift Valley Province. The research, conducted in 2007 by the MOH and FHI, also found that providers were less likely to offer contraceptive counseling and methods to HIV-infected women on ART than to women who were not on ART, even though the fertility desires of the two groups were similar.

The new integration strategy is nearly complete, and FHI has already field-tested a draft provider orientation package with 86 providers in Coast Province and Rift Valley Province. FHI is also collaborating with USAID, the National AIDS/STI Control Programme (NASCOP), the Department of Reproductive Health (DRH), APHIA II, and other partners to orient more providers and monitor the progress on integrating family planning into HIV care and treatment services throughout Kenya.

Additional partners working on these activities — as part of a technical working group co-chaired by NASCOP and the DRH — include JHPIEGO, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs, and the Population Council.

Read more about improving family planning services for women and couples with HIV, including those on ART.