Our Journey
During the last six years, Zoë-Life has accomplished its intended purpose of building capacity and strengthening systems for primary health-care through HIV service support. We have increased our presence in and services to national and provincial government structures, and the next stage of this relationship is to work on focused, strategic interventions to bring government services closer to communities.
Reflecting international and South African government priorities over the past two years, Zoë-Life has set up facility-based systems to increase access to comprehensive HIV services in Municipal clinics that have had no HIV-related activities, budget or staff. In addition, Zoë-Life has worked with three small local NGOs to learn how to set up community-based, comprehensive HIV service delivery sites, and has conducted small programmes to increase access to HIV and TB care and treatment in the workplace.
With national government having mandated that HIV services be driven by primary health-care, Zoë-Life will move into a new area of systems development and strengthening: to improve community-based HIV service provision to adults and children, with special attention to programmes for pregnant women and men.
The KwaZulu-Natal Premier's Flagship Programme targets Municipal Wards in desperate need of service delivery. "War Rooms" have been established in each Ward, run by specialist teams responsible for co-ordinating service delivery. Working within this context, Zoë-Life will provide technical assistance to all stakeholders, including a range of NGOs, CBOs, government departments and community-based cadres, to augment health outreach and linkages.
Zoë-Life will continue to engage with facility-based services, providing support to Municipality management structures for team-effectiveness, management training, resources development and programme-specific training. In 2011, as a planned stage in this growth path, we transition from full-time presence at our five municipal clinic sites into focused engagement in community-based locations.
Zoë-Life's shift into the community sphere has been carefully conceived to achieve new and larger-scale levels of improvement in health and development delivery and access, by:
closing out our active, routine involvement in clinic operations, so that empowered clinic staff will own and manage these functions;
relieving congestion in these clinics;
finding and rescuing citizens who have been unable to attend clinics;
offering our services to other, unassisted clinics through community organisations working with them; and
facilitating sustainable community responses to a broad range of social needs.
Working through our established NGO, faith-based and other key partnerships, we aim to create a clinic-community support system for existing and emerging social response structures. Accordingly, our teams and programmes have been reconfigured into expert units which will provide a Basic Care package of cross-linked Adult- and Child-themed interventions and resources to mobilise informed community responses and unified action.
