Most public healthcare centres in North West do not have medicines such as antiretrovirals (ARVs).
A detailed report released by the Ritshidze organisation paints a grim picture and shows that the province is lagging behind in extending the supply of ARVs.
The report revealed that just 6% of people living with HIV interviewed reported three-month antiretroviral therapy refills – compared to 25% over the same period last year.
Ngqabutho Mpofu, the project manager at Ritshidze, said their detailed report into the state of the public healthcare system in North West found an improvement in certain indicators and deterioration in others over the past year.
He said this affected the overall quality of treatment of HIV and tuberculosis (TB), as well as the provision of other health services.
“The report is based on the results of data collected through Ritshidze’s community-led monitoring of 13 facilities in the province together with additional data collected at 57 facilities by Treatment Action Campaign, Stop Stock-outs Project and Ritshidze related to stock-outs.
“The 2022 report identifies challenges that discourage people from going to the clinic for HIV, TB and other health services.
“Despite the improvement, stock-outs still persist. This year, there were 398 reports of different medicines, contraceptives and vaccines, being out of stock in total across 57 facilities,” Mpofu said.
He said 26% of patients said they or someone they knew had left the facility without the medicines they needed.
According to Mpofu, North West scored the worst of all the provinces monitored.
“More than 91% of public healthcare users interviewed think that waiting times are still long, and 64% of the people blamed staff shortages for the long hours waiting.
“While marginal improvement has been identified in staffing levels last year – from 0% of facility managers reporting enough staff last year, up to 15% this year – this remains a very high proportion of understaffed sites,” Mpofu said.
He said 34% of respondents were also not asked if their partners had any risk of violence, despite national guidelines mandating this process.
Mpofu said the report also showed that only 20% of gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, 9% of people who use drugs, 14% of sex workers, and 14% of transgender people, reported being offered a pre-exposure prophylaxis.
“The inadequate space also continues to be a challenge as 92% of facility managers interviewed reported needing more space for waiting areas, filing systems and rooms for private HIV counselling/testing and medical care,” he said.
Meanwhile, North West department of health spokesperson Tebogo Lekgethwane said: “The department is aware of the issues raised in that report… These are the issues that were highlighted as areas of intervention and there has been progress on them, particularly in regard to medication stock-out.
“There has been a lot of improvements in terms of the availability of medication.”
Lekgethwane said the issue of long queues is linked to the availability of staff, but there has been a lot of improvement as they have recently recruited more than 3 000 healthcare professionals.
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