Children’s HIV Intervention Program in Swaziland (CHIPS)
Children throughout Swaziland are not able to access available healthcare for HIV testing and treatment. The problem is exacerbated in rural communities by the already out of reach and continuing to rise cost of transportation.
Children and by default their caregivers living in rural Swaziland do not have the resources to access HIV/AIDS related interventions. These resources include transportation, the knowledge to know when, where, and why to go for testing and treatment, symptoms that require immediate interventions, importance of drug adherence, nutritional requirements, and even drug storage.
CHIPS objectives
- Identify children who are candidates for testing
- Hire and train a person living in each community to provide pretest counseling to the child and caregiver, transport, assistance with adherence, and inter-community support, advocacy, and education.
- Provide in-community/in-home pre-test counseling and ongoing support and education
- Provide reliable and on-going transport to clinics and hospitals for testing, counseling, treatment, support,
- Educate whole community, children and adults, to increase health and well-being, to change attitudes and behaviors towards testing, treatment, and people who are infected
- Promote “Prevention of Mother To Child Transmission (PMTCT)”
Strategy
Begin a program to identify children who are in need of testing and begin the process of counseling with their caregivers to bring them to testing. To make transport available to and from facilities for testing, counseling, treatment, and care as well managing the schedule of the child and caregiver to ensure adherence.
The Problem
Imagine children with little if any food, literally risking their lives to get and drink contaminated water from the Mbuluzi, often sleeping on cold dirt floors, and many with abusive adult caregivers or no one at all to care for them. Welcome to Maphiveni, a squatter community in a rural area of eastern Swaziland. The people who populate this area are the abandoned families of former sugar cane workers with little to no means to provide for themselves. Add the barriers of minimal education, great distance from appropriate HIV care, no transport, and possibly no adult caregivers to take children and the challenges grow exponentially.
Maphiveni is not a unique community is Swaziland
Without successful, comprehensive intervention and support, the morbidity and mortality rates of children who are HIV+ will only increase. Current statistics provided by Baylor COE indicate that 66% of children will not receive the anti-retroviral medications and support they need. As a result they will die.
Only 15% of untreated children
will be alive at 10 years
