Study of young people attending an adolescent friendly centre.

Adolescents are the individuals between the ages of 10 and 19 years and the youth are those between the ages of 15 to 24 years. World Health Organisation has therefore defined young people as individuals between the age group of 10 to 24 years. In our country Adolescents comprise more than one fifth (22%) of the total population. Therefore Family Health Division, Ministry of Health, established an adolescent friendly centre at Bir Hospital on 5th January 2002. This paper has tried to study and analyse the young population attending this centre at a fixed period of time. This study was carried out to a. Find out the total number of adolescents. b. Estimate their male: female ratio. c. Find out their ethnicity, address, marital status, education, and occupation d. Learn what Health and Development problems these young people have. This is a cross sectional study done at Bir Hospital adolescent friendly centre for a period of one year. All young people (adolescents and youths) coming to this centre within the specified period are included in this study. OPD register was used to collect the data, which was obtained and analysed manually. Total of 956 young people were provided healthcare and counselling services from this centre. Out of them, only 9.21 % were males. 887 (92.78%) of this population are adolescents, 69 (7.22%) are from 19 to 24 years age group and 880 (92.05%) of them are youth. Majority (28.56%) were Brahmins. 313 (32.74%) of these people were from outside the valley. 9 (10.23%) out of 88 boys and 384 (79.34%) out of 484 girls were married. 1.14% of boys and 14.63% of girls were illiterate. 4.55% of boys and 14.17% of girls had not completed the studies of standard five. 17.05% of boys and 47% of girls had not completed their school. 81.82% of boys and 38.36% of girls had joined the college. It also showed that 521 (54.50%) of these young people are students but 35.94% of girls are housewives. 278 (32.03%) girls presented with menstrual problems and 22.12% (192) came with pregnancy related problems and 15.27 % of these young people presented with the symptoms of various infections Twenty six (3%) girls came with features of anaemia and 22 (2.53%) girls had dropped in for family planning services. 20 (2.09%) of these young people had some psychological problem (mainly anxiety) and 9.62% of them had various types of skin problems. Adolescent friendly centre can play a vital role to support and help a good number of adolescents of the society. Key words: Adolescents, youths, and young people.