The INFO Project Blog

Reporter Collins Vumiria wrote a great editorial for Panos’s AfricaVox blog, in reprinted in Uganda’s Monitor, about the urgent need for the government to involve traditional birth attendants in preventing HIV.

She writes,

rural village women still struggle to get the money for transport to hospitals, even when they are only a few kilometres away. If birth attendants were fully trained and integrated into the healthcare system, they could be equipped with better knowledge of HIV prevention and to advise women about the drugs that can help prevent their children contracting HIV. 

Vumiria spoke with a 52 year-old birth attendant with two years of schooling who last attended a workshop on HIV counselling in 1992. The woman, who Vumiria writes was “confused about how the virus could be diagnosed,” sought further training yet was brushed aside by local medical workers.

Uganda’s minister of state, Emmanuel Otaala, said the government does not see a role for TBAs in HIV prevention, and in fact would like to stop them from delivering babies, because they are “not recognised trained health workers.” She told Vumiria,

We cannot realise the Millennium Development Goals if TBAs are delivering mothers in the villages.

However, the reality is that less than half of Ugandan women deliver in hospitals. That’s why what EngenderHealth’s ACQUIRE Project is doing in an eastern district of Uganda makes so much sense, right now.

ACQUIRE’s technical manager Dr. Henry Kakande told us recently that they’ve been using the Population Reports issue on “Family Planning for Women with HIV” to show providers how to integrate HIV and family planning services. For example, providers learned about counseling messages to pass on to clients, messages clients could use when approaching their partners to discuss contraception. Nurses were trained to provide family planning as a comprehensive package for home-based HIV care. According to Dr. Kakande, clients are already responding to the program’s enhanced activities.

Clients wanted the family planning service to be integrated within the routine HIV care services to minimize the stigma they were getting at some of the non-HIV care facilities. They are very happy with the newly integrated services we are providing.

Click here to read about Panos London’s Illuminating Voices. 

INFO hosts a site devoted to the provision of sexual and reproductive health services with activities for preventing and treating HIV/AIDS here.

Stay tuned for more examples of how the report on Family Planning for Women with HIV is being used in the field to promote best practices–or tell us your own stories.