Ipas's training and learning approaches cover:

• Clinical methods: Ipas’s clinical curriculum includes current, evidence-based clinical protocols and standards that are consistent with the World Health Organization's recommendations.
  • Ipas provides training and technical assistance to replace sharp curettage with vacuum aspiration for abortion and postabortion care and to promote the choice between manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) services and medication abortion.
  • Ipas's training materials and activities emphasize counseling and service provision to help women select and obtain contraceptive methods to prevent unwanted pregnancy and the need for abortion.

• Quality of care
  • Woman-centered counseling
  • Ipas’s woman-centered model of reproductive health care includes training and guidance in administrative and other aspects of high-quality service delivery. Examples of service-delivery improvements include moving services to outpatient care, improving client flow, introducing facilitative supervision, and strengthening monitoring and evaluation systems.

Ipas is committed to developing training and learning interventions that are strategic, methodologically sound, flexible, adaptive, and responsive to various contexts, needs and challenges, including those of:

• the individual learner;
• the team, service delivery system or institution within which the learner will operate after training;
• women and communities that learners serve or with which they partner.

Key training and learning areas include human-performance technology; continuous quality improvement; knowledge management; data-based program design and decision-making for needs assessment, ongoing monitoring; and evaluation of outcomes and the impact of training on access to the quality abortion and postabortion care services.

Ipas’s training and learning initiatives and materials involve:

• participatory, experiential learning methods based on principles of adult learning and empowerment education;
• training of trainers, which creates local capacity to sustain skills development;
• training of service providers;
• various venues, including teaching hospitals, medical and nursing schools, and other facilities in the public and private sectors;
• various learning opportunities, ranging from short and limited to longer and more comprehensive;
• self-paced "e-learning" courses available free online via IpasU; the initial courses on this evolving site are adapted primarily from Ipas’s state-of-the-art postabortion care and abortion care curricula and directed to health-care workers;
• client education — reaching women directly to provide them with clinical information and to inform them of their fundamental rights and the law.

The Ipas Global Trainers’ Network (GTN) is a network for clinical trainers and organizations that provide sexual and reproductive health training with a focus on abortion and postabortion care.

The main goals of the GTN are:

• To ensure more accurate, current and consistent training and clinical standards, approaches and messages
• To foster clinical trainers’ professional development, support and communication with colleagues
• To identify appropriate trainers for specific reproductive health training events

For more information, contact training@ipas.org.