Contraception for adolescents in low and middle income countries: needs, barriers, and access.

Substantial numbers of adolescents experience the negative health consequences of early, unprotected sexual activity - unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortions, pregnancy-related mortality and morbidity and Sexually Transmitted Infections including Human Immunodeficiency Virus; as well as its social and economic costs. Improving access to and use of contraceptives - including condoms - needs to be a key component of an overall strategy to preventing these problems. This paper contains a review of research evidence and programmatic experiences on needs, barriers, and approaches to access and use of contraception by adolescents in low and middle income countries (LMIC).

Applying organisation theory to understand barriers and facilitators to the implementation of baby-friendly: A multisite qualitative study.

Objectives: (a) to apply an organisation-level, pre-implementation theory to identify and describe factors that may impact hospitals' readiness to achieve the Ten Steps and (b) to explore whether/how these factors vary across hospitals.

Design: a multisite, descriptive, qualitative study of eight hospitals that used semi-structured interviews of health-care professionals. Template analyses identified factors that related to organisation-level theory.

A qualitative study of condom use among married couples in Kampala, Uganda.

Twenty-five years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, condom use among married/stable couples remains low and under-researched in developing countries, even countries with high HIV prevalence. Introducing condoms into a long-standing relationship, in spite of HIV risk, is likely to be awkward. We conducted a qualitative study in Kampala, Uganda, with 39 couples reporting 100% condom use in the previous three months.