Sneak Peek: International AIDS Conference 2010 Next Week in Vienna
The 18th International AIDS Conference is taking place next week, from July 18-23 in Vienna, Austria. The conference brings together researchers and advocates to share findings and re-energize international collaborations to fight the disease.
Some HAI staff will be there, including Barrot Lambdin, our Technical Advisor for Implementation Science. He will be presenting some research from Mozambique that focuses on health workforce levels and their impact on HIV programs ("Human resource levels affect attrition from HIV treatment programs in Mozambique").
This study looked at the impact of patient volume, clinical staff burden and pharmacy staff burden (number of pharmacy visits per pharmacy staffperson) on patient attrition from HIV treatment programs in central Mozambique.
Interestingly, although doctors and nurses are both in short supply in Mozambique -- only 3 doctors and 21 nurses per 100,000 people -- this study revealed that the pharmacy staff burden is the bigger bottleneck for patients to remain on treatment. In other words, patients attending clinics with a higher pharmacy staff burden were more likely to leave HIV treatment programs.
Mozambique has only 3 pharmacy staff per 100,000 people, and per Mozambican treatment standards, patients come in monthly for pharmacy appointments to get more antiretroviral drugs. Thanks to task-shifting of certain HIV care activities from doctors to nurses, and the fact that patients don't typically need monthly clinical visits once they are established on treatment, the burden on doctors and nurses can be less than on pharmacy staff.
These results present new areas for further study, such as uncovering ways to improve the flow of patients at pharmaceutical visits thereby reducing waiting times. Also, new policies may be considered to relieve the burden on pharmacy staff, which would hopefully improve the patient experience and result in better treatment outcomes.
Barrot will be presenting these findings through a poster session, and will also be blogging from the conference to report on sessions of interest, including:
- Using Quality Improvement methods to strengthen HIV care
- Will we achieve universal access to HIV care with the health workforce we have?
- ART for prevention -- what are the implications?
- and more....
Check back next week for posts from Vienna on the latest in HIV/AIDS research and policy!
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