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Reproductive Health
The Reproductive Health Team focuses on policy and system changes that will reduce unplanned pregnancy among youth and adults
in our community.
The Reproductive Health Team is now focusing on the issue of Teen Pregnancy Prevention. Two key pieces will include:
1) an assessment of reproductive health services currently available to teens within the community
and
2) a review and possible update of the family life/sexuality education curriculum in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County
schools. Some of the many partners in this effort include the Forsyth County Infant Mortality Reduction Coalition, the Forsyth
Adolescent Health Coalition, the School Health Advisory Committee, and the public school system.
The last major campaign of this team was the Preventing Unplanned Pregnancies campaign, launched in Spring of 2006. The main strategy of this initiative was to educate health and social service providers about emergency contraception so that they could share correct information with their clients and patients.
As recommended by national medical authorities, local providers were asked to:
- educate sexually active women and men about birth control and emergency birth control;
- encourage sexually active female patients to use a reliable method of birth control;
- and equip those sexually active young women interested in emergency birth control with advance prescription for the medication in case they ever have a birth control emergency.
The main partner in this effort was the Forsyth County Infant Mortality Reduction Coalition.
The Reproductive Health Team has trained over 350 health and human service providers. These people now share the information with tens of thousands of community members. Fact sheets and posters in English & Spanish have been created to educate providers and community members about emergency contraception, when the medicine is most effective, and to let people know that this medicine is NOT “the Abortion Pill.” Protocol changes have been implemented in a number of community clinics.
For more information and links to posters and flyers OR to request a presentation on Emergency Contraception, go to http://www.helpourbabies.org/prevent_pregnancy.aspx
The Reproductive Health team meets quarterly and communicates primarily through e-mail. Get involved and contact us for more information about this team.