Measuring Family Planning Service Quality Through Client Satisfaction Exit Interviews

creased demand for services, then it should have a positive net effect on service providers’ income. Although some quality improvements are costly and therefore may not seem feasible in a period of declining donor resources, many others (such as more courteous attention) can be implemented at little or no cost. Conversely, failing to address quality may be more costly than most service improvements would be, as has been argued in the literature related to total quality management and customer satisfaction in private-sector companies.2 This is likely true for nonprofit family planning settings as well, at least where clients are asked to pay a portion of service costs.3 The increased interest in service quality has been accompanied by a similar increase in efforts to monitor and evaluate it. Judith Bruce’s well-known quality-of-care framework4 provides an excellent starting point for the development of evaluation tools and indicators based on six central elements of quality: choice of contraceptive Timothy Williams is senior evaluation advisor with John Snow International, Arlington, VA, USA. Jessie SchuttAiné is an independent consultant. Yvette Cuca is evaluation officer with the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Western Hemisphere Region. At the time the research described here was conducted, Timothy Williams was senior project analyst, Jessie Schutt-Ainé was evaluation officer and Yvette Cuca was consultant for the Transition Project, IPPF, Western Hemisphere Region. The development of the client satisfaction exit interview methodology was carried out as part of the Transition Project, a cooperative agreement between the U.S. Agency for International Development and IPPF, Western Hemisphere Region. The authors thank the family planning associations that used the methodology for providing feedback on how it could be improved. In particular, they thank BEMFAM, PROFAMILIA, MEXFAM and FPATT (the IPPF affiliates in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Trinidad and Tobago) for pretesting the original questionnaires. Finally, the authors thank Victoria Ward for her critical review of the manuscript and Inés Escandón for her review and editing of the text and tables. Measuring Family Planning Service Quality Through Client Satisfaction Exit Interviews