Abstract:
Youth tend to be less informed, less experienced, and less comfortable in accessing reproductive health services than adults. Seventy-eight percent of the 1.7 billion young people in the world live in the developing world; 22% of the total population of Ethiopia and 20.9% of Amhara region is young. Ministry of Health developed Youth friendly reproductive health service (YFRHS) standards and guidelines to address health problems of the youth. Adolescents can be excluded by poor service delivery or their own lack of awareness worldwide. Studies in Africa including Ethiopia showed that utilization of youth friendly reproductive health service is very low or neglected. It is also under utilized in towns of Amhara regional state. Some factors for poor utilization of Youth Friendly Reproductive Health Services are socio demographic and cultural, inconvenient locations & working hours, lack of awareness, feeling healthy, unsupportive provider attitudes and sex, quality of services, lack of confidentiality and privacy, and high costs of the services. Objective: To assess the level of youth friendly reproductive health service utilization and associated factors among Debre Tabor town youth. Methods: A community-based cross-sectional study triangulated with in-depth interview study design will be conducted in Debre Tabor town from June to July 2014. Structured interviewer administered questionnaire will be used to collect data from 387 (selected by systematic random sampling from four kebeles of the town) sampled youths about their utilization of Youth Friendly Reproductive Health Services and associated factors, and in-depth interview guide for identifying associated factors. The data will be entered by epi.info 3.5.3 and analyzed by SPSS version20.0. Logistic regression will be used to identify predictive variables.