Antenatal clinics offering and referring for voluntary counseling and testing

Antenatal clinics offering and referring for voluntary counseling and testing

Antenatal clinics offering and referring for voluntary counseling and testing

The percent of public antenatal clinics offering coun­seling and voluntary testing for HIV by trained staff or referring to voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) services

Evaluators randomly select public antenatal clinics in a health facility survey. Evaluators conduct staff inter­views and record reviews to ascertain whether any of the clinic staff are trained in counseling, and whether the clinic routinely counsels clients about HIV in preg­nancy and offers HIV tests with post-test counseling or refers clients to qualified outside services. The annual client volume of the clinic is also recorded.

This indicator is calculated as:

(# of antenatal clinics offering voluntary testing for HIV and post-test counseling by trained staff / Total # of antenatal clinics) x 100

Evaluators may then weight the result by client volume.

Data Requirement(s):

Total number of antenatal clinics and number of ante­natal clinics offering and referring for VCT

UNAIDS guide to the monitoring and evaluation of pre­vention programs for mother to child HIV transmission; UNAIDS tool for evaluating HIV voluntary counseling and testing

Private sector clinics will often take the lead in provid­ing services for those HIV-infected pregnant women who can afford to pay for interventions. Because such interventions are relatively expensive, the goal of na­tional programs is to extend their reach to less affluent members of society, through service provision in pub­lic facilities. Thus, evaluators should calculate this in­dicator based on service provision in public sector clin­ics. However, countries that are making an effort to in­crease training in counseling for staff at antenatal clin­ics in the private sector or among traditional birth at­tendants may want to include such groups in this indi­cator as well.

Ideally, this measure would include all public antenatal services in a country. Since the number of such services is often too large to be practical, sampling is adopted.

This indicator is most useful in countries actively ex­panding coverage of maternal to child prevention ser­vices. A steady rise in the indicator is likely to reflect a steady expansion of service provision. However, if sam­pling is necessary, the indicator may be slow to reflect progress.

safe motherhood (SM), newborn (NB), integration, HIV/AIDS

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