Team PATA

PATA Conferences - South Africa 2009 PATA Forum

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

There were three themes for the 2009 conference.

The first was 'Advanced ARVs' which dealt 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 was 'Adolescent Care Revisited' which looked at why we need to be adolescent friendly and what we can do to achieve this in our clinics. It also included practical life-skills training instruments for working with children.

On the third day of the forum, PATA teams were treated to presentations under the headline topic of 'A Psycho-social Clinic Toolkit (Practical approaches to common problems)'.

As in previous years, the 2009 PATA Regional Forum (Southern Africa) provided 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 was 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 October 2010) and the West African Forum (Francophone) planned for the end of 2010.