Original articleWhat Impact Has England’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy Had on Young People’s Knowledge of and Access to Contraceptive Services?
Section snippets
Methods
As part of the TPSE a national tracking survey was carried out with the aim of monitoring progress towards the Strategy’s goals. A random location sample of young people aged 13–21 years was interviewed in 12 waves at 4-month intervals between October 2000 and June 2004. Young people living in the randomly selected geographical areas (enumeration districts with on average 150 households) rather than the same individuals were interviewed at each wave. Fieldwork was spread across 200 sampling
Characteristics of respondents
Interviews were achieved with 8879 young people across the 12 waves of the tracking survey. Respondent characteristics are presented in Table 1. There were no significant variations in these characteristics over the course of the evaluation.
Knowledge of contraceptive services
In all, 77% of young women and 65% of young men interviewed between 2000 and 2004 knew of a clinic or place they could visit if they wanted advice about sex (Table 2). Proportions were higher among young women and men who reported sexual intercourse (89% and
Discussion
Improving young people’s knowledge and access to services are goals that have been set to meet the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy’s aim of reducing under 18-year-old conception rates. Little change in knowledge of contraceptive availability and services was observed, with the exception that over the 4 years more young men were aware that contraception is free of charge and condoms are freely available irrespective of age. A third of young women and just under half of young men remain unaware that
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the following groups and individuals for their support to this work: members of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy Evaluation Advisory Group, the Evaluation team members of BMRB (Bridget Williams, Caroline Simpson and Patsy Lamb) and Rachael Parker, the Evaluation Co-ordinator. The evaluation research was supported by a grant from the Department of Health. Ethical approval for the evaluation was gained via the Joint UCL/UCLH Committees on the Ethics of Human Research. This work was
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