Clinic-CBO Collaboration (C3)
Between 2014 and 2020 PATA worked with Positive Action Children’s Foundation (Now ViiV Healthcare Positive Action) across twelve countries and strengthened over 50 community-clinic collaborations. Together, PATA and PACF demonstrated how transformative collaboration at a local level between clinics and community-based organisations (CBOs) can be to the health response. C3 outcomes have demonstrated that clinic-community partnerships are feasible, acceptable, and can result in joint ventures that positively impact HIV services and community action.
C3 has made a significant contribution to a growing community of practice centred around clinic-CBO collaboration, and has been endorsed and integrated into many processes and programmes as a central methodology. The C3 methodology invests in building effective and structured clinic and community relationships, provides the necessary capacity-building and tools, works to strength local ownership, joint monitoring and district co-ordination. This can build and strengthen effective pathways for HIV case finding and management, improving service delivery, care and support across clinic and community platforms for children, adolescents and their families.
Two toolkits and a Be Connected e-learning course informed by the C3 successes and lessons learnt will continue to be the integrated into PATA programmes and will be shared across the PATA network to strengthen the continual adoption of the C3 methodology and approach.
See C3 in Action.
The Be Connected e-learning course
The Be Connected e-learning course aims to further scale the results of collaboration by providing a practical ‘how to’ application in the methodology of working together that is centred on cooperation, joint planning and structured partnership.
While the course is based on lessons from Clinic-CBO Collaboration (C3), which aimed to strengthen linkage and retention along the paediatric and adolescent treatment cascade, its intention is to be applicable to all target populations and service areas. The course provides transferable building blocks for cooperative planning, implementation and monitoring of community engagement strategies and activities. The course has also integrated lessons and contributions from key stakeholder projects.
C3 objectives
Leverage and Integrate C3 Learning and Methodology
- Consolidate C3 learning into a Toolkit for local and global distribution
- Develop a complementary online set of interactive tools and infographics
- Link learning to a Community of Practice on clinic – community engagement
Scale up clinic-community partnerships and joint initiatives
- Scale-up and initiate new clinic-CBO partnerships
- Facilitate Partnership Initiation Forums and the development of Joint Activation Plans
- Undertake operational deep dive case study on C3 methodology
Grow the C3 Community of Practise to document and share lessons
- Establish an online set of tools and e-learning platform
- Share information, tools, and resources
- Document and share promising practices and operational research
- Support the Paediatric Adolescent HIV Learning Collaborative for Africa (PAHLCA)
Advocate for increased investment, integration and monitoring of C3
- Communication strategy on C3 methodology developed and distributed
- C3 presentations, papers and policy briefing documents or case studies delivered
- Promote increased investments into C3 and community engagement
- Advocate for improved monitoring and reporting on clinic-community engagement
We are far from ending new HIV infections in children and ensuring quality care for women living with HIV and their families. There are HIV high burden countries and locations where progress in preventing vertical transmission has flatlined with poor uptake of testing, gaps in ART initiation, low retention rates and poor adherence to HIV treatment.
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown us further off track. In a health system that has limited human resources and whose clinics are already overburdened, high impact interventions, together with community-based models need to be identified at each step of the HIV prevention, care, and treatment cascade. Greater investment is needed to strengthen and document the impact of effective clinic-community collaboration. One of the most glaring disparities of the AIDS response to date is the failure to provide life-saving treatment to children and adolescents living with HIV. While 85% of pregnant women living with HIV and 74% of adults overall were receiving antiretrovirals in 2020, only 54% of children (0-14 years). There is also a significant treatment coverage gap in adolescents 15-19 years, with only 54% of adolescents on treatment. It is estimated that close to 1.3 million children and adolescents living with HIV (0-19 years) are untreated, even though new testing technologies including point of care EID and HIV self-tests are more widely available, and recently approved paediatric ART options are better and cheaper than ever before.
C3 partners
