Following a joint visit by a team from the United Nations Population Fund Office (UNFPA) and the Ministry of Public Health (Minsap) to five municipalities of the Cuban province of Holguín, much work remains to be done to achieve the optimal quality of comprehensive health services for adolescents, as well as to reverse the high incidence of health problems such as teenage pregnancy.
The tour covered the municipalities of Antilla, Báguanos, Calixto García, Mayarí and Urbano Noris to see how the implementation of quality standards go in the comprehensive health services for this age group, with special interest in sexual and reproductive health services. In addition to monitoring the availability of long-acting contraceptives, donated by UNFPA.
According to the official of the Mother-Child Care Program of the Ministry of Public Health, Milagros Santacruz Domínguez, “these municipalities have been chosen because they have an increase in adolescent fertility and sexually transmitted infections, which is why they have had this situation for several years.
She explained that a special action was adopted at the ministerial level to increase the quality of care for the adolescents. “For this reason, the World Health Organization issued global norms called Quality Standards for Adolescent Care; and this is what we are trying to rescue in each of these municipalities. This will be done in the 50 municipalities included in the project at the national level, to be then extended to the rest of the country”.
Adolescent pregnancy is a sign of demographic and social concern for the authorities in the country. The official explains that Cuba is affected by this social problem in the eastern provinces mainly, and Holguín as a province is between second and third place, historically.
As a social problem, it is approached in an intersectoral way, where all the sectors have a commitment at the national level to reverse this situation. This is a global initiative, to which Cuba has been a signatory since 2018, modifications were made to these standards, according to the social context, concluded Santacruz Domínguez.
In this way, both managers and technical teams of the aforementioned territories that were previously trained last July, already had the data collection to establish the baselines, which consist of initial measurements of indicators that make it possible to observe and evaluate future changes. Hence, kind of technical reviews of the process, as well as corrections and recommendations in order to improve the work.
In each municipality visited, UNFPA and Minsap representatives held meetings with adolescents and applied questionnaires to learn more about their experiences in the access and use of comprehensive health services, in relation to sexual and reproductive health.Their experiences and opinions were explored and topics such as adolescent pregnancy, the use of contraceptive methods, and different expressions of gender violence naturalized in dating relationships.
Since 2019, the province of Holguín has been part of this project, where in an initial stage the municipalities of Cacocum and the provincial capital city. Subsequently, these five municipalities just visited municipalities were included. However, the purpose of the health authorities is to progressively add the rest of the territories of the province to in order to reduce the social phenomenon that is currently teenage pregnancy.
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