The Operations manual provides guidance on planning and delivering HIV prevention, care, and treatment services at health centres in countries with high HIV prevalence. It provides an operational framework to ensure that HIV services can be provided in an integrated, efficient and quality-assured manner.
The manual is based on the public health approach to scaling-up HIV services in resource-constrained settings, which includes simple, standardized regimens and formularies; standardized supervision and patient monitoring approaches; as well as integrated delivery of care at primary health centres within a district network. Decentralization of services to health centre and community level is facilitated with the public health approach.
This manual supports efforts to deliver and scale up HIV prevention interventions including provider-initiated testing and counselling, prevention of mother-to-child transmission, prevention of HIV and TB transmission and prevention of disease progression in HIV infected individuals.
The Operations manual deals with environmental health, logistic, managerial and infrastructure requirements for delivery of the essential HIV and primary care services as laid out in clinical guidelines such as country-adapted WHO IMAI, IMCI and IMPAC guidelines or other national clinical guidelines for provision of acute and chronic HIV care.
This manual is written as a learning aid and job aid for the health centre team, and in particular the health centre manager (often an in-charge nurse). Specific chapters may be particularly useful for those with tasks such as managing the supplies, providing laboratory services, or managing patient records, registers and reports.
During country adaptation, some content may be presented as wall charts or used to develop standard operating procedures for various services or specific types of patients.
District management teams, which supervise and support health centre services, should also find this manual helpful, as should national Ministries of Health and other partners responsible for planning and supporting the decentralization of HIV services.
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