Sustainable resources
Implications for action
Governments need to make sure that adequate resources (staff and financing) are available to support adolescent health programmes. The needs of professionals need to be assessed, and competency-based professional education made available. Provider payment mechanisms need to encourage youth-friendly service provision, and factors that increase young people’s financial vulnerability need to be addressed.
WHO/Europe support to countries
WHO/Europe supports countries in developing adolescent health programmes in a health-system perspective, which includes dealing with issues of financing and human resource capacity.
WHO developed the WHO orientation programme on adolescent health for health care providers, a training package that helps countries to make health care providers aware of the special characteristics of adolescence and able to address some adolescent-specific health needs and problems. In the WHO European Region, some countries adapted the programme to their needs, including Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Lithuania, the Republic of Moldova, Romania, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Ukraine. Accompanying job aids – a set of algorithms for managing various scenarios – were introduced in Belarus, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine.
Background
Youth-friendly initiatives are often project based and their sustainability is questionable after the projects end. Providers’ payment mechanisms discourage the provision of time-consuming services such as counselling and outreach activities: the services at the core of youth-friendly health service provision. Health care personnel receive poor or no training in addressing adolescents’ needs. In some countries, health insurance schemes or specific budgetary allocations do not cover adolescents; relatively small expenditures would be catastrophic for certain groups of young people, such as those whose parents are working abroad. With the financial crisis and the diminished employment opportunities for young people, the period is increasing between the end of their insurance coverage as children and the start of coverage as wage-earners.
