Field Placement: Mexican
Family Planning Association (Mexfam), Republic of Mexico
Preceptor: Elizabeth Butrick
Student Name: Nicole Monastersky
Year: 2002
 |
 |
 |
| Photo 3 |
I completed my summer internship with Mexfam, Mexico's Foundation for Family Planning. Part of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, this organization was founded in 1965, and has since undergone various changes. In addition to family planning services, Mexfam now offers a range of health services and operates 20 clinics throughout the country. Mexfam also hosts two other major services: the gente joven (youth) program and the community health worker program (with promotoras) that work in conjunction with the clinics, throughout the country. These two other programs help reach other populations that are not directly served by the clinics-the youth and the rural poor.
My internship was focused most specifically as an evaluation of the family planning services provided by the Mexfam clinics. Together with my supervisor, Elizabeth Butrick, and another student volunteer, Graciella Funes, we visited 11 of the clinics in various parts of the country. For the bulk of my time, I was stationed in the small, agricultural community (population 50,000) of San Luis de la Paz, Guanajuato. There, I conducted the evaluation (surveyed and interviewed female clinic users of family planning use and interviewed doctors regarding provision of family planning methods) in order to evaluate the differences between users of family planning methods from Mexfam and users of family planning methods obtained at other locations (e.g. other hospitals, pharmacies).
While the majority of my time in San Luis de la Paz was spent on the family planning evaluation, I was also involved with two other projects in this particular clinic. The first was a recruitment of community promotoras from the local municipalities to participate in a new series of community talks/ lectures on a health topic of their collective choosing. The second involved designing a funding proposal for a "letter project" whereby migrant workers from San Luis de la Paz living in the US would be contacted and informed about the risks of STDs and HIV/AIDS, as well as family planning and contraceptive methods available.
In addition to San Luis de la Paz, I also went to San Luis Potosi, Xola, and Guadalajara to conduct the family planning evaluation in the respective Mexfam clinics.
This evaluation was created to investigate the extent to which family planning services are actually being provided and delivered to Mexfam users. Mexfam provides comprehensive health services in most of its 20 clinics throughout the country. However, there are no exact statistics on family planning services provided and thus, no existing way to measure all the family planning services being used by the clients.
In order to assess the use of Mexfam family planning services, we designed several evaluation instruments. One interview was created for the doctors to query about the provision of family planning services and the other two interview designs were applied to the two types of users of family planning methods (one for women who use/used Mexfam for family planning methods and the other for women who get their family planning methods outside of Mexfam). Prior to the delivery of the client interviews we surveyed all women using the Mexfam clinics (during our visits to the clinics) to determine if they were (current or prior) users of family planning methods. The design was created to determine the differences between users of Mexfam family planning methods and users of family planning methods from other health facilities.
Back to CHS Field Studies Placement Index | Back to CHS Field Studies | Back to Field Studies Home