Overview
Family planning and comprehensive abortion care (FP and CAC) is part of primary health care, but it remains inaccessible to many. Qualified health workers with skills matched to people’s needs are crucial to bridging this gap. While competent health workers are essential to the delivery of effective, timely, affordable, equitable and respectful care, in many countries health workers remain untrained in areas related to family planning and comprehensive abortion care.
The skills and knowledge needed to provide these important and life-changing services must< be embedded in a competency-based education system with competency-based performance< assessment. Therefore, the World Health Organization (WHO) has developed the Family planning and comprehensive abortion care toolkit for the primary health care workforce or the FP and CAC Toolkit, for short.
The cornerstone of the Toolkit (Volume 1) presents the competencies needed for FP and CAC. These competencies, which are based on recent evidence and guidelines, will help set standards for education, training and performance. This FP and CAC Toolkit, led by WHO’s Department of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Research and its Department of Health Workforce focuses on three areas:
- FP and CAC competencies for the primary health care workforce (Volume 1)
- Programme and curriculum development (Volume 2), and
- Dissemination implementation, monitoring and evaluation (Volume 3, forthcoming).
Related toolkit