January 5

Happy New Year!

Apart from working at the maternity this week—and getting to celebrate the arrival of 2013 with laboring women and their new babies—I’ve been busy completing the list of HIV+ women who have been lost to follow-up.  From March of 2009 until November of 2012 there were 240 women who started receiving HIV care at HIC, but now no longer are doing so. I really hope that the social worker and the community health workers will make use of this list and that some of them will be found and restarted with their HIV care. I am however, not incredibly optimistic that many women will be located. The social worker and community health workers are already very busy and to try to track down 240 women—with little more than their names, dates of birth, and possible addresses—seems very ambitious. But I feel that if even one or two women are found and are restarted in care that my work on the list was worth it. 

Along with the lost to follow-up list I’ve also been working on an “opposite” list—collecting information about those women who are still receiving HIV care at HIC. The hope is that with both lists, providers at HIC will have a better sense of whether or not there are differences between those women who are lost to follow-up (LTF) and those who are active. Maybe it’s the timing of enrollment in the HIV program, or whether or not a woman gives birth at home or in the hospital, or her age that is a significant factor in whether or not she stays in care. With that information the providers at HIC may be able to modify certain aspects of their program (i.e. enrolling women earlier if that was shown to make a difference) or focus on certain “at risk” women (i.e. if older age is show to have increased LTF risk, providing more education/support to those in that age range), thus—hopefully—decreasing the programs LTF rate and ensuring more women (and their babies) receive the important HIV medication and care.

This week I also went into the capital and had the pleasure of meeting a woman who is running GHESKIO’s Nurse Practitioner program. (GHESKIO stands for the Haitian Group for the Study of Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, and was the first institution in the world dedicated to the fight against HIV/AIDS. It has provided continuous free medical care in Haiti since 1982) I talked to her about what can be done to better define the role of an NP in Haiti—to distinguish NPs from the nurses and doctors, and to make sure that the doctors don’t worry about NPs “taking their jobs”. I also got to meet three women who have already graduated from GHESKIO’s NP program who are working as NPs at GHESKIO. All of the women that I met were amazing. They were all very motivated and open to improving the NP program and striving to provide the best care they possibly can for their patients.