Guatemala

This report summarizes key results of the evaluation of a distance learning course in the Standard Days Method. This course responds to a growing demand for low-cost options to training for family planning service providers. This option was considered as a potentially useful alternative to traditional class-room training, which can be both costly and time-consuming. [adapted from abstract]

This article describes the experience of Guatemalan students at Cuba’s Latin American Medical School. The students’ education emphasizes health problems and diseases characterizing the epidemiological situation in their home country and in-depth courses in disaster management, as well as clinical experience in Guatemala. [adapted from author]

Before the project began, 300,000 remote rural inhabitants in the Mayan highlands lacked basic primary care, the NGO civil society in health lacked cohesion, and the MOH NGO granting program needed revising. From 2000 to 2004, the NGO Networks Project implemented a grants program that helped form networks of NGOs, strengthening health services and testing innovations in service delivery, and improved monitoring and evaluation. As a result, by 2004, high-quality services had been extended to 317,000 rural people and surveys showed significant improvements in health care coverages, NGOs had been unified into networks, a national NGO federation had been formed, and innovations had been adopted by the MOH for improvements in the national MOH NGO program.

This paper describes the experiences of three types of programs (government, reproductive health NGO, and women’s health NGO) in Kenya, India, and Guatemala that integrate gender in their work and examines how they integrate gender into programs that improve quality of care and access to care. It should be emphasized that this report does not document whether gender integration results in higher quality and access, but rather documents how gender integration can take place. [author’s description]

The Knowledge Improvement Tool (KIT) was created to allow family planning supervisors to quickly identify gaps in knowledge of Standard Days Method (SDM) providers, allowing them to provide targeted, effective support during routine supervisory visits. This study was designed to compare the effectiveness and the cost benefit of KIT to other methods of reinforcing SDM provider knowledge. [adapted from author]

Many women choose to use traditional birth attendants in Guatemala to deliver their babies - a fact that can’t be ignored, according to local public-health officials. They hope a new culturally sensitive approach to training traditional birth attendants will help improve their quality of care and save lives. [adapted from author]