Counseling Skills in Family Planning: Trainer's Handbook

Abstract

This handbook is based on the premise that family planning counselors must understand their clients thoughts feelings and behavior as sexual beings and is designed to enable counselors to learn skills in relationship building and communication to better understand the meaning of sexuality for their clients. The model consists of 4 steps: 1) establishing the relationship between counselor and client 2) exploring the clients problem 3) clarifying understanding of the problem by both counselor and client and 4) developing a plan of action. Information giving is not seen as the sole purpose of the counseling but as one of several techniques designed to help the client make an informed decision. The training materials are compiled in 2 handbooks 1 for the trainer and 1 for the participant. Included are instructional units format for practice exercises instructions on workshop mechanics and team training ideas. The participant handbook is intended to guide the learning process during and after training workshops and contains practice activities review sheets forms for training evaluation and a bibliography.