Health workers needed to treat HIV/AIDS in Africa

More health workers needed to treat HIV/AIDS in Africa

As part of the Stop AIDS Campaign, the African Medical and Research Foundation UK (AMREF), is calling for strengthened health care systems, including more health workers, to improve HIV prevention, care and treatment in Africa.

New figures, released to coincide with World AIDS Day, show that 25.8 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are living with the disease, 60% of all people living with HIV. In terms of treatment, it is undisputed that anti-retro virals (ARVs) prolong the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS but only 11% of people in Africa that need this treatment actually receive it[1].

ARVs not getting out to rural areas

In Kenya, for example, only 40,000 out of 200,000 who need ARVs are receiving them. And most of the drugs are only available in Nairobi and the bigger district hospitals. One of the major reasons for this is the lack of qualified staff in sub-district hospitals able to administer the drugs.

Not enough trained health workers

Peter Ngatia, AMREFs Director of Learning Systems says: We need to have more trained doctors in sub-district hospitals in Africa or we need to train health staff at a lower level, such as nurses and clinical officers, to be able to administer AIDS treatment.

In Suba, an island off Lake Victoria in Kenya, 30.8% of the population is HIV-positive. Thousands of these people are in need of anti-retro virals but only a third of those who are eligible are actually receiving them. They are only available at the district hospital and the people living in the rural areas cannot afford to get there. The Ministry of Health wants to establish ARV centres in the sub-district hospitals but is unable to do so because of lack of qualified staff.

Peter adds: In my home town, Othaya in Nyeri District, we have been waiting to install an ARV centre for six months but we cannot do this as there is only one qualified doctor there for a population of 92,000 people. They just dont have the capacity.

AMREF is responding to this crisis by training mid-level health workers in Kenya and south Sudan to administer ARVs and to supervise and support those who are taking them.

Many people who are taking ARVs are not correctly following the treatment and this can result in the failure of the treatment itself and development of multi-drug resistance (MDR). One of the reasons for this is that there is not enough trained staff at a local level to make sure that they do this.

In Tanzania, AMREF is training nurses in the gold-mining town of Geita, Mwanza Province, to counsel people to take their ARV treatment correctly and to eat the right nutritional foods.

Poor laboratory standards in rural areas

In district hospitals the procedure for getting ARVs is often delayed as there are no facilities to test the strength of peoples immunity system (CD4 count), which determines whether or not they should be taking the treatment.

AMREF is improving laboratory facilities and training laboratory staff in district health authorities throughout east Africa.

To address these problems on a wider scale AMREF is calling on:

African governments to invest more in its health systems to bridge the gap between formal health systems and rural communities and to provide more incentives to health workers.

African governments and the international community to train more health workers to be able to deliver ARVs.

The international community to end conditions attached to grants, loans and debt relief that force African countries to cut health spending.

The international community to support health training programmes in Africa in order to improve the chances of attaining health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

ENDS