On Friday, October 20th, 2023, Hannah Comiskey, a postdoctoral researcher at Trinity College Dublin, presented about estimating public and private contraceptive method supply shares using Bayesian hierarchical models. Details for the talk are below.
Title
Estimating public and private contraceptive method supply shares at national and subnational administration levels, using Bayesian hierarchical models
Abstract
Contraceptive method supply shares reflect the contributions of the public and private sectors
to the distribution of a given method each year. Quantifying these public/private sector
supply shares of contraceptive methods within countries is vital for effective and sustainable
family planning delivery. They are useful to Family Planning officials as they show where
contraceptive users have obtained their most recent supplies. Unfortunately, due to the cost,
many low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) are not in a position to carry out the
national-scale surveys necessary to collect this data regularly. Therefore, they evaluate the
contraceptive supply market using out-of-date data.
Using out-of-date supply share estimates for family planning monitoring has significant
knock-on effects. They may lead to inaccurate conclusions on the stability of the
contraceptive supply market and not reflect the current trends within the contraceptive supply
markets. In addition, the estimation of other family planning indicators that depend on
method supply shares will also be inaccurate and distorted. To date, neither Bayesian nor
frequentist methods have been used to estimate this important family planning indicator.
In this talk, I propose a methodology using Bayesian hierarchical penalised spline models for
estimating modern contraceptive method supply shares, at national and subnational
administration levels, for LMICs participating in the global Family Planning 2030 initiative. I
describe a series of Bayesian models that evaluate method supply shares using both large
multi-country data sets and computationally efficient single-country data sets. Lastly, using
case study countries, I evaluate the impact of using national-level annual contraceptive
method supply shares with uncertainty to calculate another key family planning indicator,
estimated modern use.