Team PATA

Newsletters

2007. Vol II Issue 1

Working together to improve and extend care for children and families affected by HIV/AIDS.

In this issue:

1. PATA 2006/7 conference
2. What PATA teams will be doing in 2007
3. Thoughts and feelings from Nairobi 2006
4. A victory for ARV-treatment: Becky visits #10 Downing Street
5. New PATA administrator in Cape Town

1. PATA 2006/7 conference

It is old news for those of you who attended PATA 2006/7 in Kenya, but in this month’s newsletter we will briefly look at the conference for the benefit of those paediatric AIDS health care workers who could not attend.

Held in Nairobi from 28^th November – 1^st December 2006 and co-hosted by the One to One’s Children’s Fund and the Kenya Paediatric Association, the second annual PATA conference grew in leaps and bounds from its birth in Cape Town the year before.

That year eight countries were represented by 22 treatment teams – this year there were 32 teams from 17 different countries (and if it wasn’t for visa problems, it would have been 18 countries as the Cameroonian team could not attend in the end). Please see updated map.

Held in the Nairobi Safari Club Hotel, the 164 delegates spent three days in dynamic discussion of how to improve the services and outreach at their respective clinics.

Day one was concerned with Quality Assessment, asking the question ‘How do we best do what we do?’ On the second day, Counselling Skills were discussed, with a special focus on disclosure, addressing the interaction between care worker and patient while Social Entrepreneurship got a chance on the final day as conference-goers looked at how to amplify their health care capacity through partnerships.

Teams made up of counsellors, pharmacists, nurses and physicians exchanged experiences with people in their professions from other countries in order to develop and improve their own clinical models of health care delivery and anti-retroviral therapy to children.

Conference proceedings will be published as soon as possible and will be mailed to all PATA teams and available to all interested parties. An in-depth video on disclosure, with footage from the group workshops, is also being produced and will be made available to all PATA clinics.

2. What PATA teams will be doing in 2007

In an important development from the 2005 conference, the 2006 conference looked at how the brief surge of contact arising from the PATA conference can be carried into the following year on a practical, ongoing level.

As the PATA conference is a fertile breeding ground for new ideas, it was decided to put some of these ideas into practice in order to improve services at each clinic.

Each team decided upon specific tasks to focus on in 2007 and PATA will provide the network platform and support base for these tasks to come into fruition. This brought real solutions and action to the proceedings.

In fact, in future we will refer to ‘the PATA process’, because the conference has become a staging post for treatment teams and a launch pad for the tasks they plan to complete in the next ‘PATA year’. The year between meetings will therefore become much more significant than the conference itself.

An ‘expert patient’ project, which was presented by the Partners in Health team from Kigali, and promoted by Shaffiq Essajee from the Clinton Foundation, has been chosen as one of the leading PATA enterprises for the 2006-2007 year.

Teams will shortly be receiving forms with which to apply for funding to employ expert patients in their own clinics. These experts will perform a number of tasks in and around clinics and it is expected that they will be a valuable presence, identifying closely with carers/patients and relieving our hard pressed health care workers from many time consuming burdens. We predict that the expert patients will increase clinic capacity and improve the quality of health care in a significant way.

Grassroots football also captured the attention of a number of clinic teams that have selected engagement with local organisations as one of their self-improvement tasks.

A select group of mentors have been appointed by PATA to assist each clinic in completing their set task successfully. This means that every clinic will get expert advice and guidance throughout the year while building and developing a tangible improvement to their capacity.

Teams will be contacted very shortly with the name of the mentor who has agreed to work with them. The PATA directorate is working on process and outcome indicators that will help the teams and their mentors to monitor and evaluate their progress and to report back to the whole of ‘TEAM PATA’.

At the same time, this newsletter will keep everyone else posted as to how clinics are going about in achieving their tasks – this means that the newsletter together with www.teampata.org) will be your guide to achieve similar goals or complete similar tasks.

We are all here to learn together about how we can improve our delivery of care and make conditions better for our patients so we hope that 2007 will be a year of real and visible progress. Don’t hold back on peppering us or any of our respondents with questions or queries – that’s what we are here for!

3. Thoughts and feelings from PATA 2006⁄7

We spoke to a couple of conference-goers about what they thought of the 2006 conference.

Dr Robert Fubisha (from the Livingstone General Hospital in Zambia) believes that PATA will play a big role in wiping out stigma regarding HIV/AIDS in Africa. This will be an ongoing process in the years to come.

Fubisha believes the conference was a great success. “The team I came with now know that what we are doing is exactly what we should be doing”. We can also see that other teams from other countries are doing the same thing.”

The Livingstone team’s energy and enthusiasm was notable throughout the conference. It was striking, that when it came to a selection of tasks for the upcoming year, they had already assigned each task for the personal attention of a particular member of the team.

As a possible improvement to the conference, Fubisha suggests that this sharing of ideas must be expanded even more. “There should be more time to share local experiences sufficiently” he says.

This sharing of ideas between multi–disciplinary teams is central to PATA’s approach to paediatric HIV care.

Sara Stulac (from Partners in Health in Kigali, Rwanda) says she wanted to show how encouraged her Rwandan team has been with what they have been able to achieve in that country so far. “I also wanted to strengthen connections and partnerships with teams, especially from countries near Rwanda.” she says, adding that her team would like to help other teams to find ways of reaching more children with treatment.

She also believes the conference was a success, especially because it brought together several Francophone teams from countries around Rwanda. “It was great to get to know people from other countries and to learn more about how they work,“ Stulac says, “And to watch them work together to come up with ideas and concrete plans to improve their care and teamwork at home. I think a major strength of the conference is its focus on creating and implementing concrete plans for teams to use in their own countries.”

For the future, Stulac sees PATA in a central, networking role, providing members with “support, resources and encouragement”. “The ultimate goal,” she says, “ is to reach all the children in Africa who are infected and affected by HIV and to provide them with the best care possible.”

4. A victory for ARV-treatment – Becky visits #10 Downing Street

Becky Pienaar was seven when she first got anti-retroviral therapy at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town.

"She and most of the other children at Nazareth House ( a children’s home in Cape Town) were almost always sick,” says Paul Roux, "At that time the children were dying so often, that playing ‘funeral-funeral’ was a favourite game.”

Paul tells how the children from Nazareth House almost always came last during footraces on school sports days. But within a year of first receiving treatment, Becky one day excitedly told her carers that she had won her race and would be competing in a bigger race meeting the next day. Becky, now 12, and three other Nazareth girls also have a dancing group, The Footloose Kids, who have been performing all over Cape Town.

Her treatment, made possible by One to One Children’s Fund, has allowed her to live her life to the fullest. This was high-lighted early in January when she met and had tea with Cherie Blair at #10 Downing Street in London.

Becky had been visiting her foster parents in England for a couple of months and the meeting with Mrs Blair was set up by Rita Eker and David Altschuler of One to One Children’s Fund.

We wish Becky all the best with her future!

5. New PATA administrator in Cape Town

After helping PATA along in the first year of its existence, we say goodbye to Kate Kerber this month. Kate was invaluable over the past 18 months as she liaised with different clinics across the continent.

Kate has taken up a permanent position with Save the Children and on behalf of all here at PATA, we wish her all the best. It really was a pleasure working with you, Kate!

Melanie Evans has been appointed as PATA’s new administrator in Cape Town and will be continuing Kate’s good work. A speech-language and hearing therapist, Melanie is currently working towards her doctorate in the field of health communication in HIV. Her specific research interest is in communication between patients and counsellors in paediatric HIV consultations.

It was through research at Groote Schuur Hospital that Melanie first became involved with PATA. Some attendees of the first PATA conference (Cape Town, 2005) might recall Melanie as being one of the writers that helped out on the conference paper that year.

Attending the second pata conference in nairobi last year, melanie helped to facilitate the counsellors’ sessions.

PATA welcomes contributions to the newsletter, if you have any news you would like to share with the PATA community please feel free to contact us at info@teampata.

Contributors to this edition: Dr Robert Fubisha, Sara Stulac, Melanie Evans, & Paul Roux.

 

P.O. Box 13657, Mowbray,
South Africa, 7705.
T: +27 21 404 3020
F: +27 21 406 6169

www.teampata.org

© Published online from South Africa.

Click here to download the PATA and Kidzpositive Western Cape Adolescent Workshop poster.