Oral

The federal Title X Family Planning Program, established by the Public Health Service Act in 1970, provides family planning and related preventive services to improve the reproductive health of women and men. The range of services provided at service sites includes: contraceptive services for persons who wish to delay or prevent pregnancy; infertility services for those having difficulty becoming pregnant; testing, treatment and counseling for HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections; and preconception health services for women who are trying to become pregnant or may become pregnant unintentionally. Beyond funding service provision, there is a growing need for the Federal government to: (1) set a national standard of care for family planning service delivery, (2) monitor access to and use of family planning services to ensure those in need are receiving services; and (3) monitor performance to ensure that services are of high quality. This panel takes advantage of the release of the updated guidelines for U.S. family planning service delivery, developed by the Office of Population Affairs and the CDC Division of Reproductive Health, to present and describe how the guidelines can and will be used to improve service quality and reproductive health outcomes; to examine the use of surveillance data to document the public health burden that Title X Program attempts to address and the coverage of services it provides; and to illustrate how administrative health data from the Title X Family Planning Annual Report can be used to measure and monitor service quality at all levels of the program–national, regional, and grantee–and guide service improvement. Learning objectives have been identified for each individual presentation.