HIV COUNSELLING AND TESTING (HCT)

Zoë-Life operates two staffed and equipped Mobile HCT clinics to respond to requests for service support from municipal health authorities and other health-promotion agencies.

Each HCT van is staffed with a team of up to five - including one enrolled nurse and one counselling mentor/co-ordinator, with a number of trained counsellors (depending on the scale of the serviced event). The vans are designed with two cubicles for counselling or clinical services, and there is space for doing PAP smears.

The Mobile Clinic provides health information, HIV Counselling and Testing, monitoring of blood pressure, TB symptom screening, CD4 blood samples, and referral. These procedures are fully documented in forms for virology requests, counselling and testing, results and referrals, as well as all relevant HCT and clinical registers.

In 2011, the Mobile HCT Clinic programme will provide on-site HIV and primary health services to people who are unable to attend static clinics, such as factory and farm workers and community members without access to any organisational structures.

Zoë-Life has begun developing an exciting intervention within the sugar-farming community, involving a partnership between the sugar millers and sugar farmers, the Department of Health and local community-based organisations. This initiative will bring a comprehensive mobile health and development service to sugar farm workers and their families.

These expanded services will include training to build energy-saving and eco-friendly facilities such as toilets, gardens fertilised from the ablutions, and solar panels for their homes. These improvements would raise their living standards, equip them with needed, marketable skills, and provide options to youth for local livelihoods.

Lenore Edwards, Zoë-Life's Projects Support Officer, is particularly concerned about people who have never attended a clinic, and is excited about extending the reach of the Mobile Services to care for them:

What about children who aren't being fed because their mother is too ill to get medical care? The denial and stigma within and around these families might block them from ever being assisted. Through Zoë-Life's many and various partnerships, our trained staff will be able to mobilise community members to find these isolated cases, and our Mobile Clinics can help them where they are.