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"Compassionate health care in the service of Christ"
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Welcome to the CATHCA Website!Who we are: CATHCA is the Catholic Health Care Association of Southern Africa. Some of us are doctors, some nurses, some community health workers, or other health professionals, and many of us are lay people doing voluntary work as home based caregivers, administrators, bookkeepers, or looking after orphans or the elderly in homes and care centres across the country. Where we are: We work around the country in all nine Provinces of South Africa, and in Botswana and Swaziland, in 38 clinics, two hospitals, many old age homes, hospices, orphanages and many Diocesan and parish projects combating HIV/AIDS. See the button marked "Members" to the left. News from the National Office - July 2010 Welcome
to this post-Soccer World Cup edition of CATHCA’s e-news; it has been an
exhilarating and exciting four weeks and the country is slowly settling back
into normality. It was amazing to hear so many languages spoken everywhere you
went! A new CATHCA staff member! We are very happy to
welcome Lungelwa Mhaka to CATHCA as our part-time Administrative Assistant.
Lungelwa will be assisting staff responsible for various programmes to maintain
databases, monitor progress and ensure reports are received regularly. Brainstorming
- how CATHCA will look in five years time Our current Global Fund
programme will be winding down over the next 18 months. This led us to hold a
brainstorming workshop over the two days of June 24th and 25th
with the aim of looking at where we saw CATHCA going and how it might look in
five year time. Staff were joined by our Liaison Bishop for Health, Bishop
Stanley Dziuba of Umzimkulu diocese, and two board members for a lively and very
interesting debate, led by Sr Shelah Mary Waspe, one of CATHCA’s original
founders. Some
of the suggestions made included; -
providing accredited training in HIV/AIDS,
palliative care, home-based care and monitoring and evaluation to its members
and the wider public -
continuing to seek funding to do HIV/AIDS work
in the areas of prevention, care and support (as it has done through its Global
Fund programme) -
working on developing a strong partnership with
government and other partners, seen as essential to CATHCA’s and its
members’ future -
expanding our membership base to include other
faith-based health care organisations -
working with parishes to establish more parish
health ministries -
looking at innovative ways to communicate with
members (e.g. SMSs)
CATHCA
staff at the training session conducted by Sr Abdia Naidoo on HCT at CATHCA
offices on Lungi organised a two-day
follow-up workshop in CATHCA has been
interviewing candidates for the full-time post of Nurse/Project Manager during
July and will be appointing another new staff member very shortly. We will
introduce both our new staff to you in the next edition! As one of the SACBC’s
Fundraising Committee, Yvonne presented at a training for diocesan coordinators
on the Church’s planned fundraising campaign in mid-July at Koinonia in With
the International AIDS Conference on in Lotto
changes the rules – SAPA, The Minister for Trade
and Industry announced new regulations for the distribution of money from the
National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (Lotto) on July 22nd, where
he said that funds distributed should benefit educational needs and rural
development. This follow concerns raised by the public and beneficiaries that
grants are late in arriving and there is a lack of effective measures in place
for expedient distribution of these funds. Resources,
planning and ambition…SA’s Minister of Health addresses the AIDS Conference
in For
the past 20 years The
effect of the HIV and TB epidemics can be seen in my country’s mortality
statistics and in estimates of life-expectancy. In TB
is the leading cause of death among people living with HIV in the Our
Country Plan for Universal Access: the National Strategic Plan The
NSP is inspired by the principle of universal access. It has two main objectives
to be achieved by the end of 2011: to reduce the number of new HIV infections by
half; and to provide comprehensive treatment, care and support to 80% of those
who need it. In
April this year we began a massive HIV counselling and Testing (HCT) campaign.
We have set the ambitious target of testing 15 million people by June 2011. If
we reach our target we anticipate that 1.65 million more people will be
diagnosed HIV positive. The campaign should provide them with the information
and access to the interventions to enable them to manage their health and to
prevent HIV transmission. Through rapid TB screening and CD4 counts the campaign
also seeks to ensure that those patients requiring treatment are fast-tracked
onto the treatment programme. In light of this we have planned for an enrolment
of an additional 500,000 patients onto ART by March 2011. Since
the launch of the HCT campaign at the end of April about 1million people have
tested voluntarily for HIV and 70,605 have been enrolled onto ART. The HCT
campaign is not without considerable challenges. One challenge is that once
people discover they are HIV-positive we must prevent them from being lost to
the health system, especially people with high CD4 counts. We must ensure that
people who are eligible for treatment start treatment on time. We must also
strengthen our positive prevention programmes. Similarly those who test negative
must be supported to remain negative for the rest of their lives. Our
HCT campaign will also place considerable pressure on the health budget,
although I think in the long run it is possible this will be offset by reducing
the number of opportunistic infections we have to treat and to reduced
hospitalisation costs. New
treatment protocols in line with WHO recommendations were implemented with
effect from 1 April this year and are as follows: pregnant women to be treated
at CD4 of 350 or less; similarly for people co-infected with TB and HIV;
children under the age of 1 to be treated regardless of their CD4 count; and
PMTCT to start at 14 weeks. By the end of 2011 all health facilities must be
able to initiate patients on ART. Key to achieving this target is to train
health workers and shift tasks from physicians to nurses, from pharmacists to
pharmacy assistants and from nurses to lay counsellors. This represents scale up
towards universal coverage! Scaling
up definitely needs additional resources, even as we improve the efficiency of
the health system. From our own revenue we committed an additional R3 billion
($400million) to fund the ART expansion as from the 1st of April this year. We
have also committed R5.4billion ($715million) to further expand the treatment
programme over the next 3 years. At current drug prices this provides for
2.1million patients to be enrolled onto the programme by 2012/2013. The
lesson in We
also have to ensure that public and donor money is spent responsibly. African
civil society organisations have a key role to play in holding us accountable.
Democracy is important to health-care and AIDS. With democracy, health ministers
like myself, can be held accountable, and supported so that we can do our jobs
more efficiently and effectively. The
investment in HIV and AIDS has led to substantial increases in health-spending
in Bill
Gates maps the way to more effective HIV prevention – AIDS Map The
world lacks the means to treat its way out of HIV, Microsoft founder and
billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates told the Eighteenth International AIDS
Conference in Gates
said: “If we push for a new focus of efficiency in both treatment and
prevention and continue to innovate new tools we can start writing the story of
the end of AIDS.” We should be launching concerted drives to increase the
provision of treatment to prevent mother-to-child transmission, and to roll out
male circumcision programmes, he added. “These are potentially so cheap and
easy to supply it’s actually more expensive not to implement them.” Gates
admitted he had been sceptical about the potential impact of circumcision. “I
agreed it was effective, but I didn’t think lots of men would come forward for
it. I was wrong: many young men are coming forward,” he said, pausing his
presentation to show a short film about a 19-year-old in In
the case of treatment to prevent mother-to-child transmission, he said: “I
really don’t understand why only 45% of mothers have access to it; we should
have it above 90%. We should go to each of the countries involved and we need to
get political leaders to set tough goals. I’d like to see even in the next
year a big change on this.” “The
problem is not lack of data,” he said. “The problem is that countries are
not using the data to make funding decisions. Instead politicians are making
decisions based on fear and stigma.” Correctly targeted interventions,
including behavioural interventions that are properly focused and researched,
might cut the global epidemic in half, Gates said. “That would be good news
but not good enough. Thankfully in the future we may have more tools.” He
referred to a mathematical model from the team at However,
he added, “We have to face that expanding our prevention efforts won’t start
driving down the number of deaths and the number of people we have to treat for
a decade. The only way we will reduce this now is to expand treatment.” When
funding is limited, he said, both the cost of the drugs and the cost of
delivering them needed to go down. Like Bill Clinton (see
aidsmap article: Clinton: 'it's the end of the beginning' of the AIDS
epidemic), he felt that the cost of first-line regimens was unlikely to
go down a lot further, although there needed to be continued price pressure on
the cost of both tenofovir and of second-line regimens, which now represented
25% of drug costs. Like “If
we could get the total cost down to about $300 a year we could treat twice as
many people,” he said. Gates commented: “Other countries might need
different interventions to achieve results, but the control of HIV would stand
alongside the eradication of smallpox as one of the great medical interventions
in history.” .________________________________________________________________________ CATHCA produces a monthly e-mail newsletter called e-NEWS,
with information about current CATHCA activities, new developments in the health
field, courses and conferences, and news about health legislation. If you
wish to subscribe, fill in your details and click on the button marked
"Subscribe" below: More information Click on a button on the left for more information about CATHCA, its history, membership, addresses of clinics and other institutions, structure, parish nursing programme, staff members, work with HIV/AIDS, and medicines. Contact details: CATHCA, P O Box 52015, Saxonwold, 2132 St. Vincent School for the Deaf, 158 Oxford Road, Melrose, Johannesburg Telephone: +27 11 880 4022 Fax: +27 11 880 4084 E-mail : info@cathca.co.za
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