Dr. Leticia Adelaide Appiah, NPC Executive Director
The National Population Council (NPC) has advocated quality and sustainable investment in the country’s healthcare, especially in family planning of women and adolescents.
Prioritising family planning, according to NPC, will help in leaving no one behind in health, hunger, poverty, education, security, employment and in dignity.
The Executive Director of NPC, Dr. Leticia Adelaide Appiah, made the call during the universal health coverage and family planning forum held in Pattaya, Thailand.
She explained that the reason for planning families is to ensure debt sustainability, climate change resilience, reduce instability or promote peace, improve education, governance and health outcomes.
“Family planning is important because it will bring about happier, healthier communities and homes. It will reduce child labour or slavery, reduce prison population and improve care of incarcerated, reduce burden borne by religious leaders, improve peace in traditional areas, peaceful homes and happy marriages,” she stated.
She stressed that it is key in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to help create the Ghana beyond aid and make the African continent a better place.
“It is therefore in the interest of nations to include family planning as a necessary component of their universal health care package to reduce mistimed and poorly spaced births pregnancies because of the huge health and financial costs and sub-optimal outcomes.
“Family Planning helps to ensure that pregnancies occur at the healthiest time of a woman’s life and these pregnancies are wanted and planned; thus, contributing to improved health outcomes for infants, children, women and families. It prevents unintended pregnancies including teen pregnancies some of which results in unsafe abortions; a leading cause of maternal death,” she stated.
She therefore suggested that all universal health care packages include family planning from inception to support women to get pregnant only when they are healthiest to result in healthy childbirths.
Benefits
She further indicated that family planning ensures women get pregnant when they are healthiest for healthy outcome of mother and baby by improving timing and spacing.
“This helps in reducing abortions and its complication and associated health and financial costs to families and nations. For employers it saves costs, reduces related absenteeism and improves productivity.
“For these and many more other benefits, Family Planning is a nonnegotiable component of Universal Health Care (UHC) package in most countries. This depicts that, when countries ignore access to family planning as part of its insurance package, the unfortunate situation can be described as a small error that produces an enormous error subsequently,” she added.
She said it is difficult to realize cause and effect in the current challenging situation, especially in Africa, attributing that “the cause of most of Africa’s predicament is the neglect of family planning as part of our universal health coverage”.
The NPC Executive Director noted that the effect manifests in gender inequality, poverty, insecurity, poor quality education, huge unemployment, illegal migration, among others.
“We need partnership to ensure FP is prioritized to guarantee the benefits. Countries offer Universal Health Care as basic human rights to the citizenry. However, data abounds that citizens of countries where leaders prioritize family planning as part of their UHC package have healthier longer lives compared to those who don’t,” she said.
“Best practices show that first and foremost, we need political buy in and ownership. Secondly, partnership to ensure commodity security (production) and supply. Thirdly, an efficient demand creation strategy to provide evidence-based education. Finally, adequately trained and skilled workforce in optimal numbers to provide information and services,” she further suggested.
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