Changing Norms and Reducing Stigma: Implementing Innovations to Expand Access to Quality PAC Service

Join us on Tuesday, January 26, 2016!

Changing norms and reducing stigma: Implementing innovations to expand access to quality PAC services

Nusa Dua Beach Hotel & Spa, Nusa Dua, Indonesia

Please join the PAC Consortium for its annual meeting at the International Conference on Family Planning in Nusa Dua, Indonesia.

Postabortion care (PAC), as an innovative care concept itself, has created opportunities to provide services for women presenting with bleeding in early pregnancy, often due to complications of incomplete abortion, particularly in societies with restrictive abortion laws. In reality, PAC has achieved more in reducing the risk of mortality from unsafe abortion by promoting treatment of the complications of unsafe abortion, promoting postabortion family planning (FP), providing compassionate counseling and psychosocial support, and engaging with communities to raise awareness for support of PAC clients and reduce stigma.

Recent innovation in providing PAC is creating new opportunities for increasing access to safer and more effective services, particularly in resource-limited settings, where frontline providers are trained to manage incomplete abortion and offer counseling, FP services, and other care. Alternatives to surgical evacuation, including manual vacuum aspiration and misoprostol, are more accessible to women and to FP service providers, offering health care providers an opportunity to share tasks related to PAC services, making services safer, more accessible, and potentially more cost-effective, while also working to reduce stigma associated with abortion and PAC. It is time to make PAC a routine, integrated package of services at multiple levels of care, to reach those in greatest need and to reduce stigma.

The PAC Consortium meeting will explore the themes of expanding and scaling up services, ending stigmatization, decentralizing services, and institutionalizing quality PAC services, as well as the many opportunities to address the continuing problem of mortality and morbidity due to unsafe abortions.

When: Tuesday, January 26, 6:00pm-8:00pm, coffee, tea, and light refreshments to be provided.

Where: Nusa Dua Beach Hotel & Spa (Keraton Room)

RSVP: Please email Christopher Lindahl to RSVP. If you RSVP'd for the November event, please re-confirm via email.