Helping Public Sector Health Systems Innovate: The Strategic Approach to Strengthening Reproductive Health Policies and Programs

Abstract

Public sector health systems that provide services to poor and marginalized populations in developing countries face great challenges. Change associated with health sector reform and structural adjustment often leaves these already-strained institutions with fewer resources and insufficient capacity to relieve health burdens. The Strategic Approach to Strengthening Reproductive Health Policies and Programs is a methodological innovation developed by the World Health Organization and its partners to help countries identify and prioritize their reproductive health service needs, test appropriate interventions, and scale up successful innovations to a subnational or national level. The participatory, interdisciplinary, and country-owned process can set in motion much-needed change. We describe key features of this approach, provide illustrations from country experiences, and use insights from the diffusion of innovation literature to explain the approach's dissemination and sustainability.

Women's status, institutional barriers and reproductive health care: A case study in Yunnan, China

“…Far fewer studies on reproductive health in China and Yunnan have been published internationally. Our systematic electronic literature search in English databases identified four articles that addressed institutional barriers in accessing reproductive health services [15][16][17][18], and four papers related gender to reproductive health outcomes [11,12,19,20] [21][22][23].…”

Systems approach to monitoring and evaluation guides scale up of the Standard Days Method of family planning in Rwanda

“…International family planning research shows that unless a new method is introduced in a systematic and strategic way, results are not likely to be positive or sustainable 6 , 7 . For scale up to be successful, understanding the changing environmental contexts in expanded geographic areas—which may differ in significant ways from the pilot sites—is critical, 8 and the concerns of many key stakeholders must be addressed 9 . Partner organizations are essential to expand access and to leverage technical and financial resources, but they often have different project and funding durations from the scale-up program.…”

The Special Programme of Research in Human Reproduction: Forty Years of Activities to Achieve Reproductive Health for All

“…More recently, the Programme collaborated with Georgetown University in the USA in the development of simpler methods, such as a new calendar-based method called the ‘standard days’ method, and in using its Strategic Approach [40] to facilitate the introduction of these methods into national family planning programmes.…”

“…This process is widely known as the WHO Strategic Approach to SRH policy and programme development. In addition to the Strategic Approach, HRP has contributed to the development of the ExpandNet network for designing scaling-up strategies [113,114]. …”