THE Bulawayo City Council (BCC) is set to partner the USAid-funded Family Health International (FHI360) in scaling up HIV and Aids awareness, treatment and care programmes, a council report shows.
BY NQOBANI NDLOVU
The FHI360, which operates in more than 70 countries worldwide, recently received a five-year grant to “complement government’s efforts to strengthen HIV care and treatment linkages of health facilities they service”.
According to a council general purposes committee report, the FHI360 plans to scale up its HIV awareness, care and treatment in Bulawayo. Currently, the health organisation is operating in eight districts of Midlands and Mashonaland provinces.
In Bulawayo, the project is targeted at working through 19 council health facilities, with high numbers of patients on HIV treatment.
“The overall goal of this project is to increase the availability and quality of care and treatment services for persons living with HIV, primarily through community-based interventions that complement the public sector as part of the multi-sectoral response led by the government of Zimbabwe,” the FHI360 wrote to council last month in a letter seeking partnership with the local authority.
Councillors assented to the request for partnership.
“In seeking to this goal, Zimbabwe HIV Care and Treatment (ZHCT) works towards the twin objectives: to increase the availability of quality comprehensive care and treatment services for HIV-positives at community level; and to strengthen community-level health systems to monitor, track and retain persons living with HIV and people living with hiv (PLHIV) in care.
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“The Zimbabwe HIV Care and Treatment project activities include conducting household index HIV testing; linking HIV-positive people to care and treatment, tracking of treatment defaulters as well as ensuring retention in care for those on HIV treatment. The target groups for the project are pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, adolescents and young women; men as well as stable and unstable patients on Art.”
