Ministry of Health Develops Standards for Adolescent and Youth Friendly Services
The Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS) with technical assistance from the World Health Organization has initiated the development of standards for Adolescent Health Friendly Ser-vices. The standards will be used as tools to accelerate imple-mentation of the adolescent health strategic plan, particularly provision of quality health services as part of the health sector's response to the needs of adolescent and young people. The pro-cess commenced with a rapid assessment of some of the existing services, analysis of strengths and weaknesses of current struc-tures and a workshop to develop the standards.
The workshop participants consisted of multi-sector partners working on adolescent health issues which included the Minis-tries of Education, Social Welfare and Children's Affair, Health, WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, Plan Parenthood Association Sierra Leone, CARE and other Non-Governmental Organizations. Youth Organizations and in/out of school adolescents also par-ticipated creating an opportunity for them to contribute to the process. Follow up actions will include field testing, consensus building, finalization and validation of the standards.