Team PATA

Reporting Back - Clinic Goals

At each PATA forum, clinics select tasks to improve the quality of their service. An analysis of the tasks in the table below demonstrates the impact of the annual PATA forum themes on the tasks taken on by clinics. As the table shows, some tasks (e.g. staffing issues) are often ongoing and cannot be dealt with conclusively in just one year, and so come up again each year.

From previous PATA forums, we know that teams set tasks on the specific topics of the PATA forum and that this has considerably improved the quality of care that they are able to provide. At the 2008 PATA forum in Rwanda for example, teams were exposed to the ground-breaking research by Mark Cotton, Avy Violari and colleagues in the CHER study, which demonstrated that it is critical to start children on ARVs as soon as possible (Violari et al., 2008)and which has resulted in the WHO amending its guidelines on paediatric ART. At the 2008 PATA forum, it became apparent that many teams did not know that they needed to start children under one year on ARVs, and that very few of them were doing so. Subsequently, many clinics that attended the PATA forum set themselves the task of initiating ART to very young children and are now doing so. This year's Day 2 topic revisited this issue in order to address some of the bottlenecks that prevent Early Infant Diagnosis and care. The table below shows several teams set tasks to address EID challenges. As mentioned the theme of day 2 plenary and workshop was 'Adolescent Girls'. The majority of tasks set by team addressed initiating and extending services to adolescents (37%). The day 3 theme of 'Quality Improvement' led to teams setting tasks to embark on data collection. Several teams also set quality improvement projects aimed at reducing waiting time (see point 7).