Healthy Families, Healthy Futures

Nov 14, 2018 11:15 AM ET

Access to safe, voluntary family planning can empower women and helps support optimal health decision-making for themselves and their families.

The Pfizer Foundation* is proud to support the Healthy Families, Healthy Futures grants, an innovative integrated healthcare delivery program that enables women to receive family planning at the same time their children are vaccinated, reducing clinic visits and creating opportunities to access care where there may be limited resources and women have little time to spend on healthcare.

With partners CAREInternational Rescue CommitteeSave the Children and World Vision, we are helping to create catalytic change through the delivery of these integrated services in the lives of women, children and their communities.

To better understand what drives the effectiveness of this integrated care model, we worked with our partners and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to evaluate the pilot programs and are encouraged by the high-level insights from the study, which found that the unique context of each country influences how integrated family planning and immunization services are delivered successfully. However, there were four overarching themes identified across all five countries that served as possible barriers or facilitators to family planning uptake and acceptance. These include:

  • The socio-cultural context of the country, factors such as religion, food security, societal structure and beliefs about family planning
  • Colocation of services, meaning family planning messages are delivered regardless of explicit requests for them
  • Community engagement through health workers, health volunteers, influential community members, expert clients and religious leaders
  • A woman’s individual decision-making regarding her health and the health of her family

Learn more about the Healthy Families, Healthy Futures grants and explore the initial findings: https://on.pfizer.com/2RPD0TN.

*The Pfizer Foundation is a charitable organization established by Pfizer Inc. It is a separate legal entity from Pfizer Inc. with distinct legal restrictions.