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Adolescent Reproductive and Sexual Health (ARSH) Strategy Adolescents (10-19 years) in India represent almost one-third of the total country's population. A large number of them are out of school, get married early, work in vulnerable situations, are sexually active, and are exposed to peer pressure. These factors have serious social, economic and public health implications. Adolescents are not a homogenous group. Their situation varies by age, sex, marital status, class, region and cultural context. This calls for interventions that are flexible and responsive to their disparate needs. Some of the public health challenges for adolescents include pregnancy, excess risk of maternal and infant mortality, sexually transmitted infections and reproductive tract infections in adolescence, and the rapidly rising incidence of HIV in this age group. Thus it is important to influence the health-seeking behaviour of adolescents as their situation will be central in determining India's health, mortality and morbidity; and the population growth scenario. The goals of the Government of India RCH-II programme are reduction in IMR, MMR and TFR. In order to achieve these goals, RCH-II has four technical strategies. One of these is Adolescent Health. Strategy for ARSH has been approved as part of the RCH-II National Programme Implementation Plan (PIP). This strategy focuses on reorganizing the existing public health system in order to meet the service needs of adolescents. Steps are to be taken to ensure improved service delivery for adolescents during routine sub-centre clinics and ensure service availability on fixed days and timings at the PHC and CHC levels. This is to be in tune with outreach activities. A core package of services includes preventive, promotive, curative and counselling services. Further, addressing adolescents will yield dividends in terms of delaying age at marriage, reducing incidence of teenage pregnancy, prevention and management of obstetric complications including access to early and safe abortion services and reduction of unsafe sexual behaviour. Since service provisions for adolescents are influenced by many factors, wherein for example, at the level of the health system, lack of adequate privacy and confidentiality and judgmental attitudes of service providers, who often lack counseling skills, are barriers that limit access to services, a package of training modules have been prepared by MoHFW for orienting programme manager and training health care providers on ARSH:
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| 1. Implementation Guide on RCH-II : Adolescent Reproductive & Sexual Health Strategy | |||