As ARV medicines become more widely available in Mozambique, people living with HIV are living longer and feeling healthier. This necessitates the expansion of prevention messages beyond the traditional target of uninfected individuals.
Namaacha Health Center and Esperanza-Beluluane Voluntary Counseling and Testing Center are partnering with the University of California - San Francisco School of Nursing to implement clinic- and community-based prevention messages that target people living with HIV.
The objective of these “prevention with positives”
programs is to prevent re-infection and co-infection of HIV among those already living with the virus, as well as among sero-discordant couples.
To date, key partnership activities have included:
- Training healthcare workers to conduct short risk-reduction interventions with HIV-positive patients;
- Developing a provider-based prevention with positives intervention;
- Developing a client-led prevention with positives intervention; and
- Expanding interventions to Mozambique’s Sofala and Zambezia provinces.
Partners have developed a training curriculum and
conducted a series of professional exchanges, as well as secured approval of a set of monitoring and evaluation instruments from the Mozambique Bioethics Committee.
Future activities will include continued support to group facilitators at Esperanza-Beluluane VCT Center along with continued visits to proposed sites in Sofala and Zambezia to initiate the collection of baseline data, which will help direct prevention efforts in both provinces.
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