Educational Tools

FEMM

https://femmhealth.org
Volunteer link: https://femmhealth.org/education/learn-to-teach

FEMM is a comprehensive women’s health program that:

Teaches women to understand their bodies and how to recognize hormonal and other vital signs of health.

Provides women with support through its free FEMM Health App to help women track their health and reproductive goals.

Provides accurate medical testing and treatment based on new research and medical protocols.

Continues to conduct research to provide women with the latest diagnostic tools and treatments for their health.

Offers training to individuals so that they can teach FEMM health tracking to women and training to medical professionals in the FEMM methods and protocols.

Natural Family Planning (NFP) Bead Method

I was asked over 10 years ago if I would please teach Natural Family Planning to community couples in Milot, Haiti. Because this wasn’t my expertise, I invited Mary Finnigan, the NFP Trainer and Coordinator at the Archdiocese of Boston, if she would join me in this task. Mary also recruited the help of Dr. George Mulcare-Jones of Maternal Life International based in Montana, whom she had collaborated with in her work, and who has taught this for years in Africa –Uganda and Zimbabwe—with Catholic Charities, and has had very positive results.  Hoping we might have similar results, we began to teach it in the northern part of Haiti initially in one Catholic parish and hospital, CRUDEM Hopital Sacre Coeur, then it spread quickly to others throughout the Archdiocese of Cap Haitian, eventually being picked up by other faith-based programs.  Currently, there are over 2,000 couples successfully using the NFP Bead Method and a Haitian Director was hired to manage ‘MLI-Haiti Program.’ The beauty of this program is that it is completely ‘natural’ and free! Once learned effectively, it allows couples to achieve a pregnancy or postpone it. Because of the color-coded beads, even illiterate couples can understand this method. Moreover, it increases and improves communication, which ultimately enhances the relationship.

What you will find here is information for healthcare providers and tools we used to train couples and ‘mentor couples.’ It’s important to have the support of the healthcare personnel who follow the community people. Therefore, we also include the medical science facts by providing information by Dr. Marguerite Duane and her website. We hope you will find this helpful to start up elsewhere in the world! If you feel you still need a train-the-trainer program, please contact us, but this should help you get started!

• NFPFacts & Overview – Dr. Marguerite Duane’s FACTS Description Sheet (Click Here)

• Introduction to Fertility Literacy and BEAD Method—an overview to start any NFP program.
  • For Regular cycles, use slides 1- 22, and then 35 – 39 for closing;
  • For Irregular cycles, use slides 1 – 16, and then 23 – 27, and then 35 – 39;
  • For breast-feeding, use slides 1 – 16, and then 28 – 39.

BEAD Method “Couple Cards” and Teacher “Cue Cards”

• Regular Cycles
• Special Cycles
• The Bead Chart

• Teacher Cue Cards
  • Teacher Intake Cue Card
  • Teacher Follow-up Visit Cue Card

How to Order the Beads

• Although you may check local craft stores the following is where we have primarily placed orders:
  • Consumer Crafts Fulfilment, 21160 Drake Road, Strongsville, Ohio 44149
  • Phone: 1-888-552-7238 (888-55CRAFT)
  • com
• Bead String
• Yellow Faceted Beads 8mm 480P Item 06101-5-T2
• Yellow Pony Beads
• Red Faceted Beads
• Red Pony Beads
• Green Faceted Beads
• Green Pony Beads
• Other sites to purchase if Consumer Crafts is out of stock:
  • Bead Tin – gold beads
  • Shipwreck Beads – bead string
  • Art Cove – yellow faceted beads

Instructions on How to Make NFP Bead String

FACTS Description

FACTS is a group of physicians, healthcare professionals, and educators working together to provide evidence-based information about natural or fertility awareness based methods (FABMs) of family planning with the medical community. Our goal is to share the best evidence available with our healthcare colleagues and students so they can:

• Educate women and men about their fertility
• Empower them to make more informed choices about family planning
• Enable women to collaborate with medical professionals to monitor and manage their reproductive health safely and more effectively

We envision a shift in the culture of medicine whereby fertility is recognized as normal and healthy.

FACTS Educational Opportunities & More

Webinars for physicians, students, residents, and other healthcare professionals.

Need a speaker? FACTS can provide a trained speaker for your event.

FACTS blog highlighting research related to FABMs. We invite anyone involved in research related to FABMs to contact us for possible publication on our blog.

Medical, nursing and other healthcare professional students and residents can serve and learn more as FACTS Ambassadors.

Medical professionals trained in natural or fertility awareness based methods of family planning can serve as FACTS preceptors.

Access fertility awareness research and summaries of research by FACTS contributing authors.

Join FACTS!