PAEDIATRICS

The information below summarizes the scope of S2S's Paediatric menu of supportive capacity building activities. Program areas and activities are prioritized based on the specific facility challenges and needs, site attributes, and available human and commodity resources:

Treatment, care and support for the HIV-exposed infant and HIV-infected infant, child and adolescent

Quality/performance improvement: support the implementation of quality and performance improvement measures, ongoing evaluation of the quality of Paediatric HIV services and program impact.

Identification of infection status: ensure timely identification of HIV exposure and infection status of infants and children, initiate HIV care and treatment services for children, provider support to provider-initiated counseling and testing.

Linkages to HIV services: improve linkage, referral and retention of HIV-exposed and infected children in care, linkage to child survival interventions.

Provision of and adherence to treatment: provide ART for all HIV-infected infants and eligible children, appropriate paediatric formulations, CTX prophylaxis, ongoing treatment adherence support.

Opportunistic infections: support the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of opportunistic infections in HIV-infected children.

Monitoring of HIV-infected children: regular clinical and CD4 monitoring, monitoring of growth and development, monitoring of nutritional status.

Improve quality of life: provide appropriate pain assessment and management, provide psychological, social and spiritual support to HIV-exposed and HIV-infected children.

Early Infant Diagnosis: Develop services to offer EID, reporting tools and counseling for HIV-exposed infants.

Comprehensive paediatric HIV care and treatment services: basic and quality paediatric care, neurodevelopmental screening and capacity building, psychiatric and psychological issues and support, HAART initiation and management in children, toxicity, treatment failure, adherence, adolescents, malaria, paediatric pain/symptom relief assessment and management, sexual abuse.

Linkage, referral and coordination with care and treatment programs for caregivers and family members: Community HIV care for HIV-exposed and infected children.

Monitoring and evaluation systems: improve/maximize use of existing paediatric HIV related health information, increase use of site level health information to make program and clinical decisions, support linkage between patient data recording and technical/management tasks/procedure, improve quality and completeness of patient related information, improve information filing system.