Training for health workers to cope with HIV/AIDS

Doctors and nurses in Africa have borne the brunt of the HIV/AIDS pandemic but have received inadequate training to cope with the disease. A new project aims to change that by providing health workers with the skills to better treat HIV/AIDS patients. Eskom, Africa's largest electric utility company, has joined forces with the Foundation for Professional Development (FPD), the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society (SAHCS) and Development Communication Associates (DCA), a US-based development organisation, to train doctors and nurses in the southern African region. According to Dr Gustaaf Wolvaardt, executive director of the FPD, "relatively few" of the estimated 31,480 doctors and 202,000 nurses in Southern Africa have received training in the clinical management of the disease, or in counselling and testing their patients and families. "Fifteen years ago, doctors in Southern Africa were not seeing a lot of HIV-positive patients. The prevalence rates were very low and the bulk of the practising medical force in countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana, had been trained before 1994," Wolvaardt told PlusNews. "The younger generation [of doctors and nurses] are emigrating [overseas]," he added. The course consists of a "solid" study module and a three-day workshop, including presentations by counsellors and people living with HIV/AIDS. The pilot programme, which began in September 2001, has already trained 2,500 health workers in the region. "We discovered that most of the doctors were seeing HIV-positive patients without realising [their status]. If they suspected the patient was [HIV] positive, they would not diagnose it because they don't know how to handle it," he said. In a region with HIV prevalence rates of over 25 percent in some countries, local doctors and nurses had to view HIV/AIDS as a mainstream medical condition. "You can't keep AIDS as a specialist area. It should be treated by local GPs and local clinics," Wolvaardt stated. But overcoming the stigma and discriminatory attitudes of health care workers would be difficult, as most tend to avoid the subject and remain detached from HIV-positive patients, he admitted. The involvement of people living with HIV/AIDS in the course, however, would bring a human face to the epidemic. The reliance on local practitioners meant that the training programme was cheaper than current training initiatives imported from Europe and North America. "This is an African initiative that will benefit the people of Africa and, hopefully, other areas as well," he added.