• Editors' Summary
• Credits

1. Why Informed Choice Matters
2. Making Family Planing Decisions
3. Policies for Informed Choice
4. Communication for Choice
• Using Many Communication Channels
• Meeting Information Needs
5. Improving Access
6. Managing for Informed Choice
7. Client-Provider Communication

• Figures
• Table
• Side-bars
• Bibliography

• What can be done?
• Women know what they want
• Why communities matter
• Eliminating targets
• More methods, more choices
• "Your health is in your hands"
• Do clients have choices?
• Please Ask!
• How much guidance?
• Active clients, better choices
• Counseling continuing clients

• POPLINE
• Media/Materials Clearinghouse
• Other Reports
• To Order
• CCP Home Page

Published by the Population Information Porgram, Center for Communication Programs, The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, 111 Market Place, Suite 310, Baltimore, Maryland 21202, USA.

Communication for Informed Choice

Communication plays a vital role in assuring informed choice of family planning. Effective communication empowers people to seek what is best for their own health and to exercise their right to good-quality health care (346). As noted, people make many of their biggest family planning decisions ,including whether to control their fertility and whether to use a family planning method,before ever seeking contraception (see Chapter 2). In order to make informed choices, therefore, most people need to know a lot about family planning long before they decide to visit a health care provider.

Around the world, millions of people get their family planning information from the mass media. Sometimes it is their main source of information. In Kenya, for example, of 1,518 people surveyed in 1992, 42% said their main source of information was radio or television (252). In 49 countries with DHS data, the percentage of married women who heard or saw family planning messages on radio, television, or both in the six months before the survey ranged from 12% in Côte d'Ivoire to 92% in Jordan. Among married men surveyed in 26 countries, the percentage ranged from 24% in Mozambique to 84% in Peru.

For people who decide to become family planning clients, communication programs supplement information that family planning counselors provide. Family planning clients want information but sometimes worry that providers do not tell them all of the facts (188). While counseling is valuable, a single counseling session with a family planning provider usually cannot cover all of the information that a person needs to make an informed choice. Nor should counselors and other front-line health care providers have to bear all responsibility for seeing that clients are well informed.

Ghana Ministry of Health As this poster from Ghana sows, communication materials can encourage people to seek information from a service provider and discuss their concerns.