By Dawn Weathersbee | Engagement Associate
Mansa Chapter Network of Zambian People Living with HIV/AIDS brings facilities to people and implements systems for tacking their health and HIV treatment.
From MANSA’s 2011 report:
Provision of HIV Counseling and Testing
The project was proposed to be implemented in nine remote rural areas of Mansa district and one urban area namely; Chembe, Muwanguni, Buntungwa, Senama, central clinic, Kabunda, Mantumbusa, Mabumba, Moloshi and Mansa General Hospital.
People who tested HIV positive had challenges in accessing the much needed services and treatment as they are not available in most of these rural health center in Mansa district.
People living with HIV/AIDS used to travel long distances to access clinic examination to see if they are eligible to start antiretroviral therapy and this takes up to three or more days for them to get the results.
These people are treated as out patients’ unless they are very sick that is when they are given accommodation and food. Most of these associated costs such as transport, accommodation and at times they have to buy medicine for treatment of opportunistic infections.
Most people living with HIV/AIDS miss clinical apartments due to costs associated to traveling these long distances.
The situation is even worse for poor pregnant who are already burdened with pregnancy and cannot manage to walk these long distances and afford to meet travel associated costs.
Preventing HIV infection, providing life prolonging treatment and relieving the impact of HIV and AIDS for children and their families and communities is possible.
Mansa NZP+ chapter since implemented a strategy which started with a systematic review of health records of 10 health facilities in the urban and remote rural health facilities to re-establish any lost contacts for baby-mother pairs with the health service.
We managed to conduct counseling and testing in all the ten health facilities this helped to reduce the waiting time on the part of clients as our volunteers supported the clinical staff in counseling and testing.
Thank you for supporting this valuable work. Your gifts to this project enable the people of the Mansa district to receive much needed care and support. In this way, you are helping to reduce mother to child transmission of AIDS.
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