An exploration of the psychological needs and concerns of HIV positive women living in Pietermaritzburg.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.The study aims to explore women's psychosocial needs and concerns following an HIV positive diagnosis. It also seeks to understand nature and various sources of care and support that women need for learning how to live with an HIV positive diagnosis. Finally, to understand what women need from HIV/AIDS health care and social service providers. In order to achieve these aims, a sample of 12 HIV positive women age between 20 and 40 was approached and interviewed at the Centres for Disease Control Clinic (CDC) in one of the local hospital in Pietermaritzburg. A qualitative research approach using semi- structured in-depth interviews was used in the study. The findings of the study reveal that HIV positive women are still faced with a range of psychosocial needs, different to that of HIV infected men. Their main psychosocial concerns centre on the welfare of their children rather their own health. Women fear rejection from their sexual relationships and as a way of coping with this, they choose to abstain from intimate relationships. Many women receive limited support from their families, health, and social welfare systems

An overview of the quality assurance programme for HIV rapid testing in South Africa: Outcome of a 2-year phased implementation of quality assurance program

Objective This is the first large-scale assessment of the implementation of HIV Rapid Test Quality Improvement Initiative in South Africa. Methods We used a quasi-experimental one group post-test only design. The intervention implemented starting April 2014 comprised health-care worker training on quality assurance (QA) of HIV rapid testing and enrolment of the facilities in proficiency testing (PT), targeting 2,077 healthcare facilities in 32 high HIV burden districts. Following the intervention, two consecutive rounds of site assessments were undertaken. The first, conducted after a median of 7.5 months following the training, included 1,915 facilities that participated in the QA training, while the second, conducted after a median of one-year following the first-round assessment included 517 (27.0%) of the 1,915 facilities. In both assessments, the Stepwise-Process-for-Improving-the-quality-of-HIV-Rapid-Testing (SPI-RT) checklist was used to score facilities’ performance in 7 domains: training, physical facility, safety, pre-testing, testing, post-testing and external quality assessment. Facilities’ level of readiness for national certification was assessed. Result Between 2016 and 2017, there were four PT cycles. PT participation increased from 32.4% (620/1,915) in 2016 to 91.5% (1,753/1,915) in 2017. In each PT cycle, PT results were returned by 76%–87% of facilities and a satisfactory result (\u3e80%) was achieved by ≥95% of facilities. In the SPI-RT assessment, in round-one, 22.3% of facilities were close to or eligible for national certification—this significantly increased to 38.8% in round-two (P-value\u3c0.001). The median SPI-RT score for the domains HIV pre-testing (83.3%) and post-testing (72.2%) remained the same between the two rounds. The median score for the testing domain increased by 5.6% (to 77.8%). Conclusion Facilities performance on the domains that are critical for accuracy of diagnosis (i.e. pretesting, testing and post-testing) remained largely unchanged. This study provided several recommendations to improve QA implementation in South Africa, including the need to improve routine use of internal quality control for corrective actions