Uganda AIDS Commission - Thank you for the invitation

Scaling Up Through Partnerships: Overcoming Obstacles to Implementation

“The HIV Implementers conference has set June’s meeting in Kampala to help partners:

- exchange lessons learned and best practices in the scale-up of HIV/AIDS programs

- focus on building the capacity of local prevention, treatment, and care programs

- enhancing quality

- promote coordination among partners.

Dialogue about future directions of HIV/AIDS programs, with a strong emphasis on:

- implementation best practices, and

- the identification of critical barriers”.

Hope Clinic Lukuli is an example of partnerships between: a CBO that became an NGO; local village and city councils; the national Ministry of Health; Ugandan and international companies; and Uganda and international health NGO and development agencies. We say thank you to Patrick Mutabwire and Elizabeth Mushabe who were willing to hear about Hope Clinic's work and agreed that we were a valuable example for the conference to learn about.

Scaling up of health services must be a balance between huge and under-served demand among the community and the technical, human and financial capacity of the health service point that the community relies upon. Hope Clinic developed a network of implementation partners to gradually expand the clinic’s in-house services and to serve the community through collaborations until it was technically and financially capable itself. The financial capacity includes fees from out-patients, sponsorship of health services by Ugandan companies and using community resources to equip and improve the clinic.

Building capacity has also been a coordinated effort to ensure that best practices are adopted and partnerships provide training and mentoring to health providers and peer educators as well as the service for the client. Hope Clinic Lukuli is a general practice health facility encompassing:

- childhood illnesses, especially fevers and other causes of dehydration;

- maternity care including RH, FP, ANC and deliveries and neo-natal care;

- out-patients consultations, laboratory examinations and treatment;

- comprehensive and integrated HIV services from mobilisation and testing to ARV.

The community served by Hope Clinic requires broad medical services and the capacity of Hope Clinic had to be steadily built to address their needs – no government staffed site exists within 3km of Hope Clinic and yet close to 100,000 people reside in that area. The good relationship that the clinic has built with the community and popular opinion leaders means that we are trusted for quality and genuine interest in people’s wellbeing. Using an established CBO/ NGO is the simplest way to scale up HIV service delivery.

The scaling up through partnerships has been the means to build our specific capacity for HIV services. The incremental growth of HIV services has relied on identifying the partner with the best practices, engaging them to recognise that the Hope Clinic and its community needs their services and negotiating the mechanism for an implementation partnership.

Hope Clinic is the most integrated example of PEPFAR, Global Fund, Private Sector and community at a single site. Yet we are a highly transferable example of how to remove the barriers and support Prevention efforts. Call or Email to learn what we did.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PEPFAR and The Global Fund approaches to Civil Society TA

Ambassador Goosby, speaking at the April 2011 Civil Society Hearing of the United Nations in New York, referred to the civil society and community implementers being ‘more effective’ and ‘better placed’ for the delivery of services. As the Global AIDS Coordinator of the US Government PEPFAR he had taken on the programme that had run since 2005 called the New Partners Initiative. The New Partners Initiative (NPI) made its first awards in 2006 to 23 prime recipients. The second round (mid 2008) and third round of awards (early 2009) brought the number of prime recipients to 53 organisations. Each received three year awards with annual values of US$500,000 to US$1 million. Many of the prime organisations reflected the original announcement by President Bush on WAD December 1, 2005: “ This new initiative will establish a competitive grants process for new partners, including faith- and community-based organizations, with the desire and ability to help implement PEPFAR, but who have li
Read more

#AIDS2011 Thirty years of HIV in Uganda

Hope Clinic Lukuli and more importantly the members of the community we serve have spent an enjoyable day with a reporter from Reuters looking at Uganda's experiences over the past 30 years. The United Nations General Assembly are holding a High Level Meeting in New York in the coming week. Reuters want to hear from the communities about how the reality of HIV has changed. Policy - Partnerships - People The success story for Uganda, and also for other countries but at a different pace, has been to develop the policy framework, form the partnerships, and most recently to think about the HIV and AIDS-related needs of the people. The policy framework and specifically the Government of Uganda's acknowledgement of the risk to the population of HIV led to openness, national awareness campaigns and the 'Zero grazing' guidance. That willingness in the late 80s and early 90s of the government to inform its populous was a key start. Consider the countries which only began t
Read more

Women and Hope Clinic Lukuli

Joyce Bbosa is an experienced midwife who described at her retirement how she has delivered the village with her own two hands. Joyce, then in her 50s, was working in a two room structure helping children with fevers – whether malaria or not – and helping scared young mothers living in Kampala away from their family support, at home in the village. Hope Clinic Lukuli grew from these two rooms by the work of a women-led committee of non-medics. Small actions by the people living in Lukuli village on the edge of Kampala brought child immunisation to the families; help with oral rehydration to manage the fevers; and access to HIV testing for the pregnant mothers and others to help reduce new infections. www.hcluganda.org Hope Clinic Lukuli has continued since 2000, and despite Joyce’s retirement in 2004, to become a new facility offering family planning and maternal health, admissions for deliveries, a laboratory and out-patients department. What makes it unusual is that the co
Read more