Supporting Adolescent-Friendly Health Services in Southeast Asia

Adolescence can be a tough time, the physical and mental transitions often made more difficult by the need to navigate social and cultural norms, educational pressures and gaps, and peer relationships. Staying healthy—body and mind—also creates a challenge.

For adolescents across Southeast Asia, who represent about 30% of the global adolescent population, the challenge to stay healthy is compounded by health systems that sometimes lack the capacity to address their needs.

In response to these gaps, amfAR’s TREAT Asia program, in collaboration with longstanding partner Chulalongkorn University’s School of Global Health in Bangkok, organized an Adolescent Health and Research Meeting, a training workshop designed to strengthen adolescent health services and research capacity across Southeast Asia.

The workshop took place in September at Chulalongkorn University and focused on adolescent development and care delivery; sexual and reproductive health; mental health and substance use; and adolescent-related health research. Participants included adolescent clinical care providers, health program implementers, and researchers.

Dr. Wipaporn Natalie Songtaweesin, meeting co-facilitator and pediatric infectious diseases physician at Chulalongkorn University, described some of the main challenges around adolescent care delivery in the region: “Current services are not set up to provide adolescent care delivery in terms of staff training and skills, clinical service provision, and other related logistics. Most services in the region are divided between pediatric and adult services, with no specific services for adolescents who fall in between these two services.”

Dr. Songtaweesin noted examples of how adolescent services are limited. Used to dealing primarily with parents when looking after children, staff often are unsure how to communicate with teens. Clinic hours don’t match teens’ school and activity schedules, resulting in poorer service uptake. A lack of integrated services results in teens with health issues needing to come for several separate clinic appointments and consequently they can drop out of the healthcare system.

Dr. Jeremy Ross, TREAT Asia Director of Research and meeting co-facilitator, expanded on the importance of supporting adolescent’s access to integrated services. “Sexual and reproductive health, mental health, and substance use issues are common among adolescents, and associated services are considered important components of a comprehensive package for adolescent health,” he shared. “In the Asia-Pacific region, social, health system, and other barriers often limit an adolescent’s access to such services, making their integration into existing adolescent health clinical settings an attractive strategy to expand access.”

He added that training is a key approach to improving and expanding service integration. “Adolescent health clinical care providers might lack particularly mental health and substance use knowledge, clinical experience and skills, so focused trainings are of benefit in developing their capacities and supporting expanded service access and integration.”

Alongside learning more about these issues, the training aimed to introduce and improve understanding of research approaches and methodologies, particularly those related to implementation science—tailoring research to real-world settings and bridging the gap between evidence and practice.

The post-workshop feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with participants identifying highlights such as designing research with patients in mind, mental health and counseling, and substance use during sexual activity, among others.

“Collaboration between institutions can build a critical mass of people who are implementing adolescent-friendly services to address health challenges in our regional settings,” said Dr. Songtaweesin. “They can provide a focal point of identification of adolescent healthcare delivery challenges, capacity-building, information-sharing, data collection, and analysis.”