Primary Healthcare Key To Tackling HIV And Aids. 29/5/09
We cannot deliver without involving the people.
An ActionAid research report emphasising good basic health services as the key to fighting Aids has been launched ahead of the week-long global citizen summit on Aids in Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi.
“Primary healthcare is the first poor of call for poor and excluded people especially women and girls”, Leonard Okello said at the launch.
“Yet it is the least funded, dysfunctional in its current state.”
According to the report, there is not enough investment to support primary healthcare and available funds are not effectively and efficiently spent.
Prof Miriam Were the chairperson of the National Aids Control Council in Kenya said that continuous efforts must be made to improve the quality of health care for the fight against Aids
to be effective.
“We cannot deliver without involving the people. The world must take responsibility to look into the preventive and curative health services at the community level,” she said.
Quoting the UNAIDS report Leonards said 75 percent of the HIV work is being delivered by community and households, yet only 25 percent of the global Aids money reaches the community level.
“It is time we thought how to restructure in order to deliver effective and efficient services to the communities rather than maintaining the Aids bureaucracies we have created”.
The research titled Primary Concern: Why primary healthcare is key in tackling HIV and Aids conducted in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda, demonstrates the role that improvements to primary healthcare could play in achieving universal access to HIV services as well as ensuring effective and sustainable response to the long term problem of HIV and AIDS.
According to the research, the long term goal should be to provide HIV services through the public health sector system.
The report calls for improvement in funding, policy and implementation revealing that available finances are not being spent effectively.
Download Report PDF(76p, 1.05MB)