Adolescent Pregnancy in Thailand: the Link between Evidence and Policy

Abstract

Adolescent pregnancy is a complex situation which broadly reflects personal, social and national impacts. The evidence showed that the burden of maternal and child health was prominent in the pregnancy of adolescents aged less than 16 years. Social impact to pregnant adolescents was mostly attributed from unintended pregnancy, social sanction and tradition. Unintended pregnancy was more common in adoles-cents than other ages leading to loss of opportunity in education and future career. Moreover, adolescent pregnancy was shown to be the economic burden of the country including Thailand in terms of lost tax revenue or increase of budget for health welfare and finance. There was no sufficient evidence on the effectiveness of interventions or policies of adolescent pregnancy prevention, thus the broad recommenda-tions for preventing and solving adolescent pregnancy were suggested. The interventions or policies that were successful in one country may not be relevant to another country where have different traditions or contexts. Therefore, the interventions or policies which will be established should be in accordance with the country context and integrating combination of interventions for the policies. The suggestions from this review article are on the following: 1) dissemination of outputs and achievements of the Act for Prevention and Solution of the Adolescent Pregnancy Problem, B.E. 2559 (2016) in order to improve the action plans and policies, 2) all organizations or institutes implement the evidence-based interventions by inte-grating the well-coordinated functions for all to reduce work repetition and waste of time and money and increasing the efficient actions, 3) development of well-prepared evaluation system for new interventions and policies launched, and 4) the establishment of a center for real-time monitoring the problems and solutions of adolescent pregnancy and unintended pregnancy where receives the information and data from various public and private organizations and institutes.