Twinning Center
Location(s): Mozambique
Description
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.