Youth Friendly ClinicsOver the last few years, the need for specialized healthcare services for young people has been growing worldwide. The demand for clinics catering to the special needs of adolescents and young people is dictated by specific reasons. Young people are in need of services that are different from those provided to adults. Healthcare experts and professional social workers have come to recognize the significance of services targeted at adolescents as a separate target group, as they are no longer children, but not yet adults. There is a wide range of assistance models existing in the world to help adolescents, starting with one-off outreach activities arranged by medical specialists down to highly specialized clinics or medical centers. One of the most efficient models is the creation of youth-friendly clinics (YFC). A youth-friendly clinic is a facility that provides integrated medical and socio-psychological assistance and counseling to adolescents on how to stay healthy, taking into account the specifics of juvenile age. The YFS ideology focuses on the provision of assistance to adolescents and young people through the understanding of their problems and joint search for ways to change behavioral patterns in order to stay healthy. Youth-friendly clinics carry out their activities based on the following three principles: Accessibility, Voluntariness and Friendliness. The principle of Accessibility envisages the possibility for any young person to gain access to youth-friendly services thanks to specific arrangement of youth-friendly clinics’ structure. The YFC application procedure is simple; all the services are provided free of charge or at a minimum price affordable to the adolescent population. Integrated assistance and counseling are provided along with any information that might be of interest to adolescents. The principle of Voluntariness envisages the creation of favourable conditions that would best facilitate young people’s informed and independent decision to approach a youth friendly clinic for assistance and ensure their participation in the clinic’s activities. YFC-related information is the principal component required for the implementation of this principle. In order to be efficient, information should be comprehensible, accurate, objective and accessible. The principle of Friendliness implies the maximum friendly attitude of all the clinic health workers towards their patients based on full understanding and appreciation of the specifics of adolescent psychology, respect, tolerance, confidentiality and support and encouragement of adolescents’ personal reflections and opinions. An adolescent’s visit to a youth friendly clinic starts with counseling which continues at all subsequent stages (diagnostics, treatment, rehabilitation) and is supplemented with socio-psychological counseling and supervision. In this way, unlike other medical facilities, youth friendly clinics provide a wider range of services. A patient receives overall assistance, both medical and socio-psychological. The principal goal of YFC activities is to keep adolescents and young people healthy through treatment and rehabilitation, disease prevention, provision of information and counseling, as well as by means of creating psychologically friendly environment for every patient approaching the clinic for assistance. Currently, in more than 30 territories of the Russian Federation around 80 health care providers provide services to adolescents and young people basing on the YFC principles.
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