Enhancing quality for clients: The balanced counseling strategy

A central focus of high-quality family-planning care is the interaction between clients and the providers who serve them. In the ideal client-provider interaction, the provider treats all clients respectfully, responds to their reproductive needs and intentions, helps in the selection of the most appropriate family planning method, and offers sufficient information to use the method safely and effectively. To improve the quality of the client-provider interaction, Population Council staff developed a “Balanced Counseling Strategy,” a type of algorithm or decision tree, to be used in combination with several job aids, or visual memory aids. The Balanced Counseling Strategy structures the client-provider interaction to focus on the client’s needs and support the client’s choice of an appropriate method, and leads to improvements in the client-provider interaction when providers use the strategy along with job aids. This brief describes the Balanced Counseling Strategy as an ongoing approach to improving quality of care. It outlines the origin and rationale for developing the strategy and details its subsequent adaptation for use in other contexts.