South Africa : Who Goes to the Public Sector for Voluntary HIV/AIDS Counseling and Testing?
This is a study of how well public voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) programs for HIV/AIDS reach poor people in township areas of Cape Town, South Africa. The study covered three public clinics, where lay counselors from local nongovernmental...
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2013
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2004/10/5371201/south-africa-goes-public-sector-voluntary-hivaids-counseling-testing http://hdl.handle.net/10986/13766 |
| Summary: | This is a study of how well public
voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) programs for HIV/AIDS
reach poor people in township areas of Cape Town, South
Africa. The study covered three public clinics, where lay
counselors from local nongovernmental organizations provided
counseling. A clinic nurse was responsible for testing and
notifying patients of the results. Waiting room interviews
of 540 patients included questions about the patients'
possessions and housing conditions designed to assess
economic status. This information was compared with
comparable information for people in South Africa as a
whole, and in South Africa's urban areas, collected
through a large-scale household Demographic and Health
Survey. The principal finding was a much higher use of VCT
services by lower- than higher-income patients. Almost 75
percent of VCT patients came from the poorest 40 percent of
South Africa's urban population, fewer than 10 percent
of patients belonging to the urban population's highest
40 percent. VCT patients were also poorer on average than
patients attending the clinics for other reasons. The study
also included focus group discussions with residents of the
townships where the clinics were located, designed to
determine what factors influence use of the clinics for VCT.
These suggest that an important reason for the predominance
of poor people among clinic patients was the poor reputation
of the services provided by the clinics. This led better-off
people to seek care from other, more expensive available sources. |
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