HIV Care

Over the past year, Masanga hospital has been working to improve its HIV services. Within the last few months, we have acquired an HIV specialist nurse (trained in counselling newly diagnosed patients), recently implemented new documentation to improve our practice, and renovated our HIV room to allow better patient care. As a result, our clinic is growing - with more new patients coming every week. However, we still face challenges. HIV treatment (anti-retroviral medicine, and medicine to treat infections associated with HIV) are supposed to be supplied for free to patients by the Government. However, there are often problems with delivery of vital medication (like anti-retroviral medicine) or some drugs are not provided at all (like co-trimoxazole, to prevent pneumonia and other infections in people with HIV). We also hope to improve the care we provide to patients, both for inpatients and outpatients. Usually, patients with HIV are monitored by checking their CD4 blood cell count and virus level - to ensure the medicines they take are working. However, we do not have access to any of these tests in Masanga hospital. With your help, we hope to ensure that we can always provide the right medicines to all patients with HIV who attend our clinic. We also hope to purchase new machines and supplies for our laboratory - like a CD4 cell count machine - to allow us to provide better care and follow up to the patients already attending our clinic.