Team PATA

Adolescent care: Piloting the use of 'Auntie Stella': A kit designed to discuss life skills with adolescents

Many children treated with anti-retroviral drugs have done very well and are now growing into adolescence. This success presents new problems as children grow into adolescence. PATA teams will remember that ‘care of the adolescent’ was a topic at the third PATA forum in Swaziland and at the 2009 forum in Gauteng.

As a follow-up to the Swaziland meeting, an adolescent care planning workshop for the Western Cape Province of South Africa was organised and presented by PATA as a regional forum during May 2008.

A major outcome of this meeting was agreement by all participants on the need for staff training to deliver adolescent friendly life skills education to HIV-positive adolescents in the Western Cape Province.

The Auntie Stella kit, produced by the Training Research and Support Centre – TARSC – in Zimbabwe (www.tarsc.org) is designed to provide adolescent friendly and highly pertinent life-skills education to adolescents – with and without HIV infection.

The Kidzpositive Family Fund (www.kidzpositive.org) has purchased 500 copies of the Auntie Stella kit, for use by HIV/AIDS counsellors throughout the Western Cape. TARSC trainers will provide ATICC, our local counsellor training unit, with initial instruction in the use of the kit. ATICC will then prepare the HIV/AIDS counsellors in our province.

This project will pilot Auntie Stella for possible use throughout the Paediatric AIDS for Africa (PATA) network. It is expected that French and Portuguese translations (already prepared) will be available for the project to be extended to all Sub-Saharan countries.

For more information, go to www.tarsc.org and click on the 'Auntie Stella' link.