Evaluation of the development of youth friendly FM

Evaluation of the development of youth friendly family medicine services in Bosnia and Herzegovina

In April 2008, Fondacija fami, financed by the Swiss Agency for Cooperation and Development (SDC) in family medicine implementation since 2001., has signed with Geneva University Hospital (HUG) a contract for the project of “The evaluation of the development of youth friendly family medicine services in Bosnia and Herzegovina”.

BiH, as other surrounding countries, is facing dramatic societal changes that have great influence on young people’s health. Young people are one of vulnerable categories, because of emerging specific health needs and great biological, cognitive and psychosocial transformations that take place in adolescence. Most young people visit a family doctor at least once a year. Hence family doctors are ideally placed to identify and respond to the common psychosocial burdens of youth.

Two decades of research have provided us with knowledge of the barriers young people face in accessing health services for the problems that most affect them. As a consequence, we now have a precise view of the services young people require in this unique developmental stage. WHO has summarised this view under the concept “youth-friendly services”, which are services that are available, accessible, acceptable, appropriate and equitable for young people.

World-wide, projects have emerged to incorporate these principles of youth-friendly services into primary care in order to more appropriately respond to the needs of young people. Whereas many of these projects are very promising, few have appropriately been evaluated. Thus we currently have no strong evidence that developing youth-friendly primary care services actually reduces the key barriers to care and improves young people’s outcomes.

Taking the above mentioned elements into consideration and building on WHO’s principles, the Foundation fami, in collaboration with a team from Geneva University Hospitals, has chosen to work on the development of youth friendly family medicine services in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the coming two-year period.

- In the first stage the project would be focused on the validation of an adapted version of the WHO tool for the assessment of youth friendliness in reproductive health services for usage in assessing primary care services.

- In the second stage different interventions aimed at improving youth-friendliness of family medicine services in Zenica –Doboj Canton would be conducted and their effectiveness evaluated with the validated instrument.