Number of women who deliver in a facility who receive counseling on FP prior to discharge. Evaluators may want to disaggregate data by age group (e.g. <20 & 20+).

Facility-based records capturing care given immediately after birth and/or FP services. This would be a delivery register or postnatal care register for pre-discharge care, with a column to capture counseling. In some cases, an FP register may be used if it has space to record counseling given to a woman during pre-discharge care.

This indicator can also be collected via surveys and client interviews, and has shown to be information that women are capable of reporting (McCarthy 2018).

This indicator measures the level of postpartum FP counseling provided at health care facilities and can serve as a proxy for the integration and quality of FP with maternal health care services. Based on recommendations from the WHO technical consultation on birth spacing, women should wait at least 24 months after a live birth before attempting the next pregnancy and at least six months after a spontaneous or induced abortion.  Practicing healthy timing and spacing of pregnancy helps achieve the healthiest outcomes for women, newborns, infants, and children (WHO 2005).

Receiving timely information about FP is a critical step in ensuring optimal birth spacing. Delivery in a facility is an important opportunity to provide information on postpartum FP, especially since coverage of postnatal care is often low (WHO 2013, Pfitzer 2015). Systematically reaching women postpartum has the potential to provide FP information and services to over 90 percent of women of reproductive age in high fertility settings (USAID, 2008).

This indicator does not measure the quality of the FP counseling services, and whether the facility has methods available, makes referrals, or follows up with women on the adoption, correct use, or continuation of FP methods. This indicator does not capture the outcome of counseling services. Therefore, it is not recommended to use this indicator in isolation. This indicator should be used with the indicator: Number/percent of women who delivered in a facility and initiated or left with a modern contraceptive method prior to discharge. Using these two indicators together can indicate when quality of counseling may be problematic, though additional data is necessary to identify the gaps in the quality of counseling and reasons behind poor quality counseling.

This indicator is only measuring counseling when the woman is still at the facility after birth. Other measures are necessary to counseling during pregnancy and the entirety of the postpartum period. Furthermore, women who deliver at home and/or do not receive postpartum care will not be included in the calculation of this indicator.

Where the indicator is primarily based on self-report, clients may not remember or know for certain whether they received counseling, especially if there is a long time lag between receiving services and the interview.