Guide for Community Assessments on Women's Health Care - ICRW

Session 5: Women’s Experience Using Services
Target Groups: HIV-positive women and negative/untested women
Facilitator’s Note: In this session women share personal experiences of using health services and
identify barriers that prevent them from accessing health services.
Working in groups, women share their stories – both “good” and “bad” experiences – and turn
them into role plays, with one role play per group. The role plays show in a funny way the actual
experiences and relations between patients and service providers.
The role plays can be, but don’t have to be, the real stories of group members.
Things to Guard Against: Make it clear that the “good” and “bad” stories relate to a woman’s health
care experience and not her life experience. For example, having a child (a life experience) is usually
seen as something good – but you could still be treated badly by the service providers (health care
experience). Similarly, receiving an HIV-positive test result is a bad experience, but the experience
within the health sector (e.g., kind doctor, plenty of support, etc.) can still be a good.
Objectives:
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Share different experiences (good and bad) on the use of health services
Identify the major barriers that prevent women from accessing health services
Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
Materials:
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One marker <strong>for</strong> each participant
Topic cards – HEALTH SERVICES, COMMUNITY, HOUSEHOLD, WORKPLACE
Preparation:
To save time you could ask the groups to prepare the role plays during the lunch break.
Steps:
➊ INTRODUCTION: Say – “In this exercise we would like to find out about your experience of using
health services. What happened? Was it good or bad?”
➋ TASK GROUPS – BRAINSTORMING AND DRAMA-MAKING (10 minutes): Divide into four small
groups. Ask two groups to share good experiences of health services and the other two groups bad.
Then each group selects one story and makes a role play to be presented to the whole group.
Report back. Each group per<strong>for</strong>ms the role play (two to three minutes). At the end of each drama,
ask: “What happened?” Then, after a few quick responses, ask: “What was good (or bad) about that
experience?” Try not to elicit bad points from the “good” drama or good points from the ”bad”
drama – and remember, you are looking at the experiences, not at the acting!
44 Chapter C: Facilitating <strong>Community</strong> Assessment Workshops