Twinning Center

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Investigator: E. Michael Reyes, MD, MPH
Sponsor: American International Health Alliance (AIHA)

Location(s): Mozambique

Description

The HIV/AIDS Twinning Center is a program of the American International Health Alliance that creates peer-to-peer relationships between organizations working to improve services for people living with or affected by HIV/AIDS. With support from the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, these twinning partnerships establish an effective framework for building sustainable institutional and human-resource capacity through the open exchange of knowledge, information, and professional experience. 

Namaacha Health Center and Esperanza-Beluluane VCT Center / University of California - San Francisco School of Nursing

 

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.

In 2006, the Twinning Center established a partnership linking Namaacha Health Center and Esperanza-Beluluane Voluntary Counseling and Testing Center 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 was to prevent re-infection and co-infection of HIV among those already living with the virus, as well as among sero-discordant couples. 

This partnership graduated from the Twinning Center's technical assistance program in 2010.

So of their key partnership activities 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 also 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.