Challenges impacting on the quality of care to persons living with HIV/AIDS and other terminal illnesses with reference to Kanye community home-based care programme

HIV/AIDS has been found to be a challenging disease to humanity, its challenge spin-offs falling especially on to the caregivers of those infected and affected by the virus. This paper aims to discuss the challenges influencing the state of caregiving in the Kanye community home-based care (CHBC) programme in Botswana. The study was qualitative in design and explorative in nature, involving 82 primary caregivers in focus group discussions, and 5 CHBC nurses in individual interviews. Caregivers were found challenged by lack of community networks support, inadequate sanitary and care packages, poor shelter compromising privacy, inadequate income and food for their clients, inadequate care motivation as their volunteerism does not attract any payment, inadequate health personnel to offer psychosocial support like counselling, and an unconducive caring environment generally. Putting in place policies to redress caregivers’ poverty, helping caregivers start income-generating projects, increasing community assistance and caregiving facilities are recommended as factors to address caregiver challenges

The Impetus of Social Work as a Catalyst to the Achievement of Millennium Development Goal Number Three in Selected African Countries. A Literature Review

The aim of this article is, through a review of literature methodology, to debate, discuss and form discourses on how social work achieves women empowerment paradigms in a few countries of the developing part of the world. Findings indicate that social work enjoys some policy global support from social work global bodies such as International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW), International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW), International Council of Schools of Social Work (ICSW); is an engine of poverty alleviation; emphasizes on self reliance; broker the needy to sources of resources; facilitates the processes of closing the gender parity gap; is a platform of social justice such as fighting female genital mutilation (FGM); and facilitates the institution of women economic groupings, gender analysis and gender mainstreaming. The article recommends that the profession needs to be more conspicuous; international social work bodies to render more policy and growth of social workers in developing part of the world; social workers need to be adequately motivated through decent and modest remuneration; countries need to have a retraining policy so that social workers are enabled to handle emergent social problems; and the need to ensure gender equity in its training. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n8p60

Exploring the Possible Gaps Associated with the Current Practice and Application of Psychodynamics in Contemporary Clinical Settings in Some African Countries

The role of psychodynamics in deciphering and determining the behaviours of people remains central in diagnosing and treating behaviours and abnormalities that can only be explained psycho dynamically. The aim of this article is to explore and discuss possible gaps embedded in the continuum of psychodynamics with the hope of coming with interventions that can make psycho dynamically processes such as counselling effective in African societies. Findings indicate the following gaps: most psychodynamic challenges in most societies are handled by traditional practitioners; there is generally inadequate application of psychodynamics due to inadequate infrastructure and human resource; the use of cultures to inform most psycho dynamically oriented challenges; and most clinical practitioners to offer psychodynamic services have been deployed to handle HIV/AIDS. The article recommends the use of traditional and clinical psychodynamic services in tandem; and expedition of training of clinical based professionals/paraprofessionals/ auxiliary workers. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n8p53