Family Planning, Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health – FRMNCH+A in India is an initiative that essentially looks to address the major causes of mortality among women and children as well as the delays in accessing and utilizing health care and services.

The RMNCH+A strategic approach has been developed by the health ministry of India to provide an understanding of ‘continuum of care’ to ensure equal focus on various life stages. Priority interventions for each thematic area have been included in this to ensure that the linkages between them are contextualized to the same and consecutive life stage. It also introduces new initiatives like the use of Score Card to track the performance, National Iron + Initiative to address the issue of anemia across all age groups and the Comprehensive Screening and Early interventions for defects at birth , diseases and deficiencies among children and adolescents.

The RMNCH+A appropriately seeks to focus their efforts on the most vulnerable population and disadvantaged groups in the country. It also emphasizes on the need to reinforce efforts in those poor performing regions that have already been identified as the high focus districts.

EduCARE India has added F to RMNCH+A to title it as FRMNCH+A, i.e. Family Planning, Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health.

Our FRMNCH+A goals

• Complement the public health initiative along with addressing the need gaps by spreading awareness, and community capacity building through support to good case traditional preventive health practices.
• Create a supportive environment for the use of modern contraception for all girls and women who need them.
• Increase access to improve the quality of and generate demand for family planning and maternal health services, particularly in under-served populations.
• Strengthen local delivery of family planning information and services, especially to adolescents. Examples include training community health workers to provide a wide range of methods, including injectable contraception, and expanding provider capacity to deliver long-acting reversible contraception for youth.
• Improve policies, enhance systems and services, and build local capacity for health care providers to provide respectful maternity care to all girls and women.
• Understand and overcome practical and cultural barriers to better reproductive health practices by communities and health care providers.
• Improve health systems’ capacity to deliver quality family planning and maternal health programs.