Care and Support for People Living with HIV/AIDS

1. Care and Support for People Living with HIV/AIDS

2. What are the needs of the people living with HIV/AIDS? • Can we classify these needs into Organisational / Physical / Social / Financial / Psychological? • What is their access to care and treatment? • What are the barriers to these? • What are the positive factors that can help them? • Who are the people who can and should support them?

3. Organizational Care • Presence of care and treatment centers • Access to treatment centers • Absence of discrimination in the treatment • Positive attitude in caregivers • Proper administration of services • Presence of skilled and trained staff

4. Physical Care • Treatment facilities at a manageable distance • Availability of transport facilities • Proper care at home • Environmental surrounding hygienic to avoid secondary or opportunistic infections

5. Social Care • Stigma associated with the infection • Care of family and children • Stigma during treatment of OI • Confidentiality • Employment opportunity • Nutrition • Family acceptance

6. Financial Care • Legal aspects settled for family • Income availability • Loss of employment • Affordability of drugs and treatment • Affordability of proper nutrition

7. Blood Safety • National Blood policy adopted in 2002 • Screening for Hepatitis C made mandatory • Blood storage centres facilitated for better access • Voluntary blood donation reaches 50% • 81 Blood component separation facilities established to ensure rational use of blood • Support to at least one blood bank in each district (1020 blood banks supported out of 1854 licensed blood banks) • Ten “State of the art” model blood banks being established in underserved areas

8. School AIDS Education Programme • Adolescence Education included in the National Framework for Education • Attempts at curriculum integration have borne fruit in some states, while others are in the process • Department of Education are partners, its their shared concern • Almost all states undertaking the programme now. About 60,000 schools covered so far. • Evaluation conducted for the programme, results encouraging • NGO involvement has been successful in some states • Guidelines have been in place, recently revised after an inclusive consultative process

9. ICTC services • Provision of at least one ICTC in each district- 4132 established • Issues to address - Improve utilisation of services ( increase voluntary walk-in clients ) • Develop and implement systems for better linkages with care services • Strengthen training, monitoring & supervision • Involving PLHA for community outreach

10. PPTCT services • 307 PPTCT centres established • All medical colleges in the country • All districts in high prevalence States • Issues • Poor access to PPTCT services • Capacity building of counsellors • Poor uptake of report collection after testing • Inadequate partner counselling • Poor follow up of drop-outs

11. Care and support • Strengthening of hospital services for treatment of OI’s • HIV - TB Co infection management • ART Services • Selective community based care and support facilities through 101 CCC. • Support to PLWHAs organisations

12. ART Services • ART roll out in India w.e.f. 1st April 2004 • Government hospitals identified for introduction of ART, free of cost. • Presently 127 ART centres are functional. • 85915 patients have been put on ART