The issue of how shocks affect health care utilization has been extensively studied, with fewer studies on the impact of shocks on preventative behavior, including family planning use. Track20's research makes two important contributions to the literature on impact of shocks in family planning; it is the first to examine impact from the supply side perspective and the first to differentiate between withdrawal of services by type of provider of family planning.
This research measures the impact of shocks in family planning during the Kenya doctors’ and nurses’ Strikes of 2016-2017. The following paper analyzes the distribution of family planning through the public health sector from December 2015 through August 2018, focusing on the dips and recoveries around the two strikes. We include monthly family planning commodity and visits data from the Kenyan District Health Information System. Our analysis finds that declines were greater and more sustained in the nurses’ strike than the doctor's strike, both in terms of Couple Years of Protection distributed, and individual methods. Immediately following the end of the nurses’ strike, there is a complete recovery in monthly family planning distribution. Survey data shows that after the strike, more women were using methods they received from the private sector and were more likely to have paid for their method.
Read the full paper here:
Presentation given at the Population Association of America 2019 annual meeting: