Providing youth-friendly health services key in fighting teenage pregnancies

Research has shown that when young people have their basic needs met and feel positive about their futures, they are less likely to engage in risky behaviors. The Carrera Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program has reduced pregnancy rates by 40 percent in New York by meeting teens educational, emotional, and employment needs.

San Francisco considers the scaling of safe injection sites, which were successfully piloted in Vancouver, to become the first city in the United States to offer this service. However, the main challenge of starting such a service in San Francisco is helping the public get over the concern that safe injection sites encourage drug use for non-abusers. Community groups actively educated the public on the benefits of safe injection sites and politicians made trips to Vancouver to observe the success in action.

Students in Scottish schools, colleges, and universities will now be able to access free sanitary products. This eliminates the indignity of “period poverty” and helps students avoid missing school due to being unable to afford sanitary products.

Uganda’s education ministry requires all schools to have incinerators to burn used sanitary pads. Lack of funding limits schools’ ability to comply. Even when incinerators exist, girls don’t necessarily use them. Educating both girls and boys about menstruation reduces stigma and increases the likelihood that girls feel comfortable enough to collect pads instead of throwing them in pit latrines.

Harm reduction is a quickly growing practices that aims to reduce drug-related deaths and the spread of disease often caused by dirty needles. Although public perception is still widely negative, the industry has seen success by using the act of offering clean needles as a first point of contact to offer other health and medical services.

To reduce maternal mortality in the Masai region of Tanzania, Catholic nuns with Sisters of Notre Dame are building hospitals and educating local women about the importance of giving birth in a medical setting. Although this goes against the community's use of a "traditional birth attendant," delivering in a hospital allows for emergency situations to be better addressed and is receiving positive feedback from women in the region.

Vermont has opened its first donor milk center which acts as a breast milk bank for mothers that are in need of milk for their newborn babies. The Vermont Donor Milk Center aims to be a "one-stop shop," and also offers lactation consultation, maternal education, and supports for non-lactating partners.

Rather than send local residents to city-run testing sites in the East Bay of California, clinics in East Oakland are now running their own testing sites to better serve their community. Although one of the sites has already tested nearly 100 people and residents who are underinsured or uninsured can be tested for free, some believe the effort should have started much sooner.

Amid the pandemic, medical researchers and an abortion-rights advocacy group in the U.S. are working to make the abortion pill available via mail. Although there is ambiguity surrounding the rules and regulations of how the pill must be distributed to patients, some doctors have helped efforts by agreeing to register with F.D.A.-approved manufacturers and a handful of states are allowing the pill to be mailed after an in-person ultrasound has been conducted.

To enhance rural access to healthcare in Nigeria, the Parkers Mobile Clinic partners with local volunteers, healthcare professionals, educators, and community development advocates to identify and remedy unique healthcare gaps. Outreach programs are then designed to provide localized mental health support, nutritional counseling, and other reproductive health services.