Team PATA

PATA Conferences - South Africa 2009 PATA Forum

The 2009 Southern African Regional forum will take place in Johannesburg, South Africa from the 2nd to the 5th of November 2009.

There are three themes for this year's conference.

The first is 'Advanced ARVs' which will deal with treatment failure, second line treatment regimens, problems with 'fragile regimens', technical and managerial aspects of a massive roll-out, developing the national ARV programme, the benefit of weight bands for calculating dosages and common toxicity.

The second theme is 'Adolescent Care Revisited' which looks at why we need to be adolescent friendly and what we can do to achieve this in our clinics. It will also include practical life-skills training instruments for working with children.

On the third day of the forum, PATA teams will be treated to presentations under the headline topic of 'A Psycho-social Clinic Toolkit (Practical approaches to common problems)'. Teams who would like to share innovative or practical measures which have helped to overcome challenges in their own clinics during the year, are encouraged to share these with other forum attendees in November. Please contact melanie@teampata.org in advance.

As in previous years, the 2009 PATA Regional Forum (Southern Africa) will provide teams with opportunities to network and share experience with others, to receive technical updates/presentations on topics directly relevant to their everyday work and to plan a work schedule for the next PATA year. This schedule will be based on the output of the forum and a review of their past progress.

Teams from East and West Africa will have the opportunity to attend the East African Forum (planned for April 2010) and the West African Forum (Francophone) planned for October 2010. If teams from these countries would like to host the forum, they are encouraged to contact melanie@teampata.org