The effects of health facility access and quality on family planning decisions in urban Senegal

Abstract

Research in developing countries is rarely focused on examining how supply side factors affect family planning decisions due to a lack of facility-level data. When these data exist, analyses tend to focus on rural environments. In this paper, we study the effects that health facility access and quality have on contraceptive use and desired number of children for women in urban Senegal. Unlike related studies focusing on rural environments, we find no evidence that greater access to health facilities and pharmacies increases contraceptive use among urban women. However, we do find that contraceptive use among urban women is higher with greater facility quality. For example, we find that increasing the proportion of pharmacies employing multiple pharmacists from 0% to 50% would increase contraceptive use by 6.0 percentage points, and increasing the proportion of facilities with family planning guidelines/protocols from 50% to 100% would increase use by 2.1 percentage points.

Predictors of Modern Contraceptive Use Among Married Women in Angola: A Population Based Study

“…In fact, married women whose husband attended primary school and higher level were more likely to use contraception as compared to women whose husband did not attend formal education. Similar ndings in previous studies (26,33), suggest husband's educational level increased the uptake of contraceptive use for family planning because of increased communication between the couple, that lead to increased support of contraceptive use by the husband, which also in uenced his actions through is adoption of condom use and/or sterilization (34,35).…”

“…We found difference in utilization of modern contraceptive across regions as suggested in previous studies (25,33,51). The disparities might be due to existed social norm and culture (45,52) and difference in accessibility of health facility and quality of the services given in the facilities across regions (33).…”

Factors Impacting Family Planning Use in Mali and Senegal

“…Public health facilities (hospitals, health centers, and clinics), as well as private facilities (hospitals and clinics) and pharmacies, offer reproductive health services including family planning. However, in rural areas women have far less access to family planning because of limited services [14,15].…”

Over the counter: The potential for easing pharmacy provision of family planning in urban Senegal

“…It may be useful to see how comparable the results of the facility audits are across the different surveys. See Cronin et al (2018 1 ) and https://tciurbanhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/senegal_note_technique_mle_etudefinal2016_0.pdf [French].It is not clear whether or not methods in stock were based on an interview with staff at the pharmacy or whether or not the methods were actually seen in stock by the interviewer. There is sometimes a discrepancy between these two assessments.A total of 3,567 clients were interviewed.…”

“…It may be useful to see how comparable the results of the facility audits are across the different surveys. See Cronin et al (2018 1 ) and https://tciurbanhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/senegal_note_technique_mle_etudefinal2016_0.pdf [French].…”