The HIV Impulse Project

The HIV Impulse Project represents an effort to better understand a number of health systems issues related to the medical care of children with HIV/AIDS in South Africa and Mozambique. The project consists of three components: a Human Resources Component, a prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT) leakage study, and a paediatric inpatient study.

The human resource component of the study aims to understand the perceptions of health personnel providing care to paediatric HIV in-patients at hospital level regarding their experiences of and views on the care of these children. The research focuses on issues including how health care personnel perceive the problem of HIV in children in the community, how the HIV epidemic affects their workload and job satisfaction, and how the problem of HIV/AIDS in children affects the overall functioning of their hospital, including allocation and use of hospital resources.

The PMTCT component aims to investigate the operational effectiveness of a PMTCT programme, whilst the paediatric inpatient study aims to determine the gap between the care recommended by national guidelines for children with HIV/AIDS, and the care which is received by such children at district hospital level (i.e. to identify where opportunities for provision of care by hospitals are missed), to explore reasons for this gap and to identify factors which facilitate and/or constrain the ability of the hospitals to provide the care outlined in the national guidelines.

The Institute for Tropical Medicine, Antwerp is responsible for the overall co-ordination and funding of the research project. The South African component is being undertaken as a partnership between the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, the School of Health Systems and Public Health (University of Pretoria) and the Health Systems Trust. Hospitals in the Eastern Cape, Free State and Kwazulu-Natal are participating in the fieldwork.

Keywords	This Item is associated with the Following Keywords: Research.
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