A family planning clinic which was part of a large public maternity hospital in Salvador Bahia, Brazil received a grant to expand its services and to evaluate a service model focusing on client counseling and education. The counseling, education, and service provision process included individual pre-consultation with a nurse, group education and discussion, a medical examination/consultation, and a post-consultation interview. The family planning service program experienced political problems because family planning research programs, which depended on maintaining a certain client load, were losing potential clients to the clinic. As a result, the service program was forced to stop admitting clients and thus the program could only be evaluated for a 3-month period. The impact of counseling and education through increases in knowledge and user satisfaction was investigated by administration of an open-ended questionnaire to 115 new and follow-up patients. Findings indicated that: (1) users were satisfied with the service; (2) group education was more cost efficient than individual counseling; (3) the patient flow model was inefficient; (4) the length of the process was inconvenient for clients; (5) sexuality education was welcomed; (6) intrauterine devices were favored by 60% of clients with only 5% choosing oral contraceptives; and (7) only 10 unplanned pregnancies occurred among 1,776 clients during the 18-month project. Apparently the linkage of information on sexuality and use of family planning methods led to the program's popularity. (ABL)