Promising Practice Post-partum and adolescent and youth family planning services thrives in a coastal hospital in Zamboanga del Sur In a third-class coastal municipality in the province of Zamboanga del Sur, the humble origins of Margosatubig Regional Hospital (MRH) as a small operating Rural Health Unit way back in 1924 now has grown into a 150-bed hospital providing a wide range of health services, including family planning (FP) and as a Department of Health (DOH)-certified Clinical Practice Site (CPS.To be able to serve more people, construction is currently ongoing to expand MRH into a 300-bed hospital. MRH also now a level-1 DOH-retained hospital in the Service Delivery Network (SDN) for a geographically isolated and disadvantaged area (GIDA). In 2019 alone, MRH served 2,898 pregnancy deliveries and 1,927 of these have been identified to have FP unmet needs. 1,016 women have been given post-partum family planning (PPFP) services (mostly post-partum intra-uterine device or PPIUD, and some bilateral tubal ligation or BTL) comprising 35.06 percent against the total number of deliveries. This was a huge leap from when they first began providing PPIUD services after September 2014, with only 42 PPIUD acceptors. The number of clients eventually picked up in 2015 with 105 acceptors and it seems to double in number every year thereafter. Alongside with this, MRH did on-site mentoring and coaching as a way of transferring knowledge and skills, particularly to those trained on Family Planning Competency-Based Training (FPCBT) 1.They responded to the need to capacitate other hospital health service providers. Also, in 2019 a total of 107 pregnant women between 10-24 years old were served in MRH, where 35 of them were adolescents (10-19 years old). As early as 2015, MRH began with only three teen mom PPIUD acceptors.The year after, there were 30 new acceptors and the numbers continue to increase every year. As of 2018, a total of 143 teen moms became PPIUD acceptors. For MRH, these translate to an income amounting to Php 1,138,000 total reimbursements in 2018 and Php 1,216,000 total reimbursements in 2019 for IUD and Progestin Sub-dermal Implant (PSI). MRH has also fully established its structure as an adolescent friendly hospital and has made huge strides in the orientation and capacity building of staff, information dissemination, recording and reporting, availability of services for adolescent and youth clients, and referrals.Years prior, teenage pregnancy rate has been high in Zamboanga del Sur and it seems the tide has been turning better this time.The province reported 2,631 teenage pregnancies in 2018 and this number went down to 1,125 in 2019, or about 43 percent reduction. All these improvements in the capacity of the hospital to cater to family planning needs were seen as the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Law took full effect since 2014. And since then, USAID has been a partner of the Philippine Government in implementing the RPRH law all over the country with their health-related projects complementing the efforts of the government. Midwife Flora Dumayo-Rajah attributes MRH’s accomplishments to their growing number of competent health service providers trained by USAID, as they now carry on with the training of new health service providers. (continued in page 67) “Since that training, I have been active in advocating postpartum family planning to our pregnant clients on a daily basis, educating them on its importance and how this can make their lives even better,” midwife Flora added. She found the MRH PPIUD program remarkable after she was able to provide a 14-year old teenage mother, back in 2014, with PPIUD as her method of choice. 70 2019 2019 Annual Annual Report Report Responsible Responsible Parenthood Parenthood and and Reproductive Reproductive Health Health Act Act of of 2012 2012 70