Break Ground: advance adolescent care in Kenya

This weekend was truly magical . Key stakeholders (about 8 in total) from across North America and Kenya came together to discuss the infrastructure of care in the adolescent clinic: areas of strengths, areas of improvement, and short and long term goals. This meeting demonstrated deep rooted committment and momentum among those who advocate for our clinic. 

Here are a few of the issues we discussed:

Strengths:

• Integrated into the hospital system with the majority of staff from the hospital 
• Provides a model for outlying sites 
• Draws both HIV negative and positive to clinic
• Provides free reproductive health care
• Committed staff
• Engages youth beyond their medical illness- Yes, thats right: daily salsa dancing, bead works, and spoken word

Areas of Improvement:

• People who are not known to be living with HIV are coming to the clinic, but not seeing the clinician. 
• Working closer with schools which will help with ART adherence
• Uptake of reproductive health care

To start to address the above, we plan to increase adolescent friendly educational and health related signage to attract the usage of our services to non HIV positive youth, start working on establishing connections with administrators in school, and ensure clinic staff are well versed in counseling  reproductive health issues. A training is in the works (which will be a refresher for some). 

The clinic is the love, sweat and tears of all of us. Those areas of improvement will come with perservence and passion (which we all have) to provide adolescents the best health possible. We have an amazing and powerful set of assets, which leds itself to sustainability, resilience, and delivering the best care to our teens for a long time to come. 

Best,