Community home based care for people living with HIV-AIDS in the Goodhope sub-district : Botswana : policy planning and implementation.
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Date
2003
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Abstract
Botswana occupies an unenviable position of having the highest HIV / AIDS
infection rate in the world, and this has generated pressures on health
facilities as they are over stretched beyond their coping capacities to attend
to the ever-increasing numbers of people who are infected. To relieve the
health care system, the Botswana government has adopted the CHBC
programme as an instrument for taking care of the infected and affected
people. The CHBC programme, which is care given to long term and
terminally ill people adopts the approach that, the family and the community
assisted by the health professionals are the primary source of support and
care. CHBC has always been in existence, though it was not given the
attention it deserves until the realities of HIV / AIDS pandemic striked and
doubted the ability of the health facilities to accommodate the ever increasing
HIV / AIDS cases.
CHBC gained more support as a result of the HIV / AIDS pandemic. This is
the case because of the programmes' rationale that, the home is the best place
to care for many of the people with terminal illness. The programme gives
patients chance to be looked after in a familiar environment and by their
relatives.
The aim of this study is to establish the existence of a CHBC Policy in the
Good hope Sub-district in Botswana, and if it exists to find out whether
implementation is congruent to the Policy guidelines, whether its
implementation is done in the most effective way, and if not, to identify
obstacles to effective implementation of the Policy in the Goodhope Subdistrict.
The hypothesis of this study is that, CHBC for people living with
HIV / AIDS is ineffective in the Good hope Sub-district of Botswana because
of shortage of resources, the unexpected (low) support the Programme gets
from the community and the incorrect understanding of HIV / AIDS issues
especially the modes of transmission by the community. The sample used
consisted of 57 research participants (10 HIV / AIDS patients, 10 care-givers,
10 Policy makers, 10 health professionals, 5 traditional doctors, 5 spiritual
healers, 5 village headmen, 1 village chief and 1 NGO representative).
The literate respondents were given structured questionnaires to complete
while those who are illiterate were helped by the researcher to fill in the
questionnaires. The focus group discussion and participant observation
methods of data collection were engaged. The study's findings were that, the
CHBC Policy does exist in the Good hope Sub-district of Botswana. The
study further discovered that, implementation of the Policy is not as effective
as expected, and this has been attributed to the following problems; shortage
of resources (manpower, transport, food etc) and the community's reluctance
to give it support.
The study recommends that, the government should provide resources to
train more professionals who would address the problem of manpower
inadequacies. There is need for communities to be mobilised so that they join
hands in the fight against HIV / AIDS. The Government has to see to it that
enough resources are allocated to the CHBC Programme. There is need for
HIV / AIDS education in order to equip the community with the necessary
information on HIV / AIDS issues. All caregivers need to be given relevant
training on HIV / AIDS issues. Lastly there is need for further research in
this field in order to find better ways of improving CHBC Programme.
Description
Thesis (M.A.)-University of Durban-Westville, 2003.
Keywords
Institutional care., AIDS (Disease), Theses--Social policy.