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COHSASA pilots HIV/AIDS District evaluation tool
COHSASA News Bulletin. Autumn 2005. COHSASA News Bulletin. Republished courtesy of COHSASA.
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The Council for Health Service Accreditation of Southern Africa?’s (COHSASA) pilot programmes for the holistic management of HIV/AIDS services within a district are nearing completion. This initiative is being executed in collaboration with the National Department of Health (NDOH) and provincial authorities, and has the financial backing of the German Society for Technical Co-operation ?– Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH.
Prof Stuart Whittaker, CEO of COHSASA, attended GTZ?’s Second Annual Review Meeting in Geneva in November 2004 to report on the progress made with the KwaZulu-Natal project. Baseline surveys have been completed in five hospitals and 16 of their associated clinics.
The aims of this programme have been to develop organisational standards and indicators to evaluate the performance of organisations within a district that manage HIV patients according to national and international norms and standards.
Known as the HIV and AIDS District Evaluation Tool (HIV-DET), the programme is to design and implement a quality improvement programme specific to a district HIV disease management programme (DMP) across a representative group of facilities to assist health providers to improve quality of HIV-related services.
The COHSASA standards, which measure the efficacy of district HIV/AIDS services, have been developed and tested over the past year with the expert input of HIV clinicians, reference to local and international literature, government guidelines ?–specifically the National Department of Health?’s Strategic Plan for HIV management ?– and the World Health Organisation?’s standards for the management of HIV patients in resource-limited settings.
The standards have also been devised in accordance with The International Society for Quality in Health Care?’s (ISQua) ALPHA principles.
The district ?– as a whole ?– is the vehicle of service provision to HIV patients and the COHSASA HIV-DET standards cover the district in its entirety. Facilities and services that will be assessed as part of the district include hospitals, a significant sample of primary health clinics (CHC, TB/STI services), district-designated ART sites, hospice services, home-based care and community organisations involved in HIV-related initiatives ?– treatment literacy and adherence support programmes.
COHSASA will report back to NDOH and funders on areas of deficiency differentiated according to individual facilities and service elements within those facilities and services.
This will allow the district management team and provincial authorities to pinpoint areas requiring strengthening throughout each service within a district, across provinces and nationally.
In collaboration with the NDOH, COHSASA will refine the programme so that it can be used to assist districts to manage HIV-infected and affected patients optimally and to monitor compliance of the district with national norms and standards. |
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