Field Placement: Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH)
Location: Hanoi, Vietnam (Other locations available)
Preceptor: David Trees
Student Name: Lisa Kramer
Year: 2002

Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) Vietnam hired me to work as an intern on their Post Abortion Care project and their Care and Support for People with HIV and AIDS project. PATH is an international aid organization dedicated to improving health, especially the health of women and children. PATH is based in Seattle, Washington, with field offices in many countries around the world. I worked with the Vietnam field office located in Hanoi. The Country Representative, David Trees, was my preceptor.

Among developing countries, Vietnam currently has the highest documented abortion rate, at 83 per 1,000 women aged 15-44. The quality of family planning is demonstrated by a fairly high failure rate of contraceptive methods in Vietnam, contributing to repeated abortion among women. Studies reveal that over half of women of reproductive age have had one or more abortions. The post abortion care project was designed to improve the quality of post abortion care and family planning counseling. Abortion services may be one of the few times women will have contact with reproductive health services and this project trains health care workers to take advantage of this contact to encourage family planning. I developed evaluation indicators and wrote the family planning portion of the post abortion care manual and training curriculum.

One study conducted by PATH found that as many as 12% of the women seeking abortion services were not pregnant. However, women are not routinely screened to confirm the pregnancy before an abortion procedure is conducted, partly because health workers have a financial incentive to conduct abortion procedures. I worked with my preceptor to develop a proposal for supplying pharmacies with home pregnancy tests to give women the opportunity to bypass the healthcare system to confirm their pregnancy prior to seeking health services.

HIV is spreading rapidly in Asia. Many organizations are working to prevent the spread of HIV, but care and support programs for people living with HIV and AIDS is an emerging area of concern. As a few organizations have begun to develop projects in care and support, IEC materials have been developed without much research or analysis of what information people with HIV and AIDS need and how they will use resource materials. The care and support project was designed to bring together people with HIV and AIDS, their caregivers and program staff to discuss the information needs and review the existing resource materials to determine the current competencies and gaps in meeting those needs. I met with the various organizations that have programs or have developed resource materials, helped to organize the workshop, and assessed the quality of current IEC materials and the competencies and gaps in meeting the information needs of PLWHA and caregivers.

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