Child Trends
About Us
Services
ExpertsCareers
Contact Us
LinkedInYouTubeBlueskyInstagram
ExpertsCareers
LinkedInYouTubeBlueskyInstagram

Toolkit for Improving Family Planning Services in School Settings

Strategies for Prioritizing Adolescent-Friendly Sexual Health Care

Andrea Vazzano, Zabryna Balén, Jennifer Manlove, Jenita Parekh, Katherine Cushing, Andrea Shore, & Donnie Greco

Young people deserve high-quality sexual health care that respects their unique experiences, strengths, and social and developmental contexts. When providers and programs ensure that health services are easily available, developmentally appropriate, and responsive to adolescents’ needs, youth will be more likely to access and use these services. Prioritizing adolescent-friendly care can therefore lead to more positive health outcomes for youth. It is one of the four foundational approaches to school-based sexual health services highlighted in this toolkit.

This section of the toolkit presents six strategies for ensuring adolescent-friendly sexual health services. These strategies are based on interviews with family planning service providers in school-based health centers (SBHCs) or other school settings. They also align with national and global guidance on providing tailored health services for youth. For example, the World Health Organization maintains that youth-friendly services should be accessible, acceptable, equitable, appropriate, and effective for young people. You will see many of these characteristics in the examples included under each of the six strategies.

Using This Tool

These six adolescent-friendly strategies target health providers and programs delivering sexual health services in school settings with a focus on providers and administrators in SBHCs. However, any health provider or organization working with youth will benefit by incorporating these principles and practices into their work.

Each of the following six strategies includes:

  1. A description of the strategy
  2. Case examples of SBHCs or organizations that have successfully implemented the strategy
  3. Reflection questions to guide teams and individuals on how to implement the strategy in their own context
  4. Links and resources for further reading

While this toolkit offers ideas and examples of ways to provide adolescent-friendly care and services, you are the expert of your own practice and program. Each strategy is flexible and will look different depending on the context of your clinic and available resources. We encourage you to use the information here as a starting point for brainstorming how you or your clinic can prioritize adolescent-friendly care.

Before getting started, we recommend that you reflect on your goals for ensuring adolescent-friendly sexual health services. To aid in this reflection, we provide some needs assessment questions to guide your thinking about existing efforts for adolescent-friendly care in your clinic setting. At the end of this section of the toolkit, we provide prompts to help you determine next steps.

Consider what you are currently doing well in your setting to ensure that services are adolescent- friendly.
  1. What do you or your clinic currently do to provide adolescent-friendly sexual health services?
    1. Which of these strategies are most successful?
    2. Where is there room to improve?
Identify the people who interact most with youth in your clinic (e.g., front desk staff, medical providers, health educators, etc.) and consider opportunities to build skills in adolescent-friendly communication and care.
  1. Who in your clinic interacts with youth or provides sexual health services or health education?
    1. Do these staff have access to ongoing training and support in adolescent-friendly practices?
    2. What processes are in place for these staff to receive feedback from youth directly?
Consider any barriers that stand in the way of providing adolescent-friendly care in your clinic or school.
  1. What barriers exist to ensuring that all students feel safe and welcome and that their needs are respected and met in your setting?
    1. What specific challenges do you or others face in interacting with youth in an adolescent-friendly manner?
    2. What specific challenges does your clinic face in ensuring access to services?
    3. What people or policies have limited your ability to provide adolescent-friendly care?
Brainstorm possible resources or assets that could help you or your organization better ensure adolescent-friendly services and care.
  1. What resources (e.g., people, funding, partnerships) could help you or your clinic provide better or more adolescent-friendly services?
    1. Are there particular staff members with expertise or skills that could be helpful in growing clinic capacity for adolescent-friendly care?
    2. What current or potential funding mechanisms are available that could support additional staff or services?
    3. Which community partners can you engage to supplement current efforts to provide adolescent-friendly services?

You can view the Needs Assessment questions as a PDF form here.

Strategies for Ensuring Adolescent-Friendly Sexual Health Services

Next Steps

Now think about concrete actions you can take to better ensure that you and your clinic prioritize adolescent-friendly care. The following statements can serve as prompts to help you identify potential next steps.

Suggested Citation

Vazzano, A., Balén, Z., Manlove, J., Parekh, J., Cushing, K., Shore, A., & Greco, D. (2022). Prioritizing Adolescent-Friendly Care. Child Trends. https://doi.org/10.56417/8169l6896o This publication is supported by the Office of Population Affairs (OPA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $2,036,999 with 100 percent funded by OPA/OASH/HHS. The contents reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, OPA/OASH/HHS, or the U.S. Government. For more information, please visit https://opa.hhs.gov/.
Sexual & Reproductive Health