It said the current practice where special HIV corners or centres had been created at health facilities to test people for the disease and attend to those living with the condition had been found to subject PLHIV to stigma and also made those who might not necessarily be having the disease, but went to the centres to test and know their status, be subjected to suspicions of living with the disease.

The Programme Manager of the NACP, Dr Stephen Ayisi Addo, who gave the advice, said some health centres had already started this integrated service by setting up special clinics where they attended to PLHIV, hypertension and diabetic patients at the same time, thus aside from the health workers, it was difficult for anyone to tell who had what condition.

“So in the medium to long term, what we keep encouraging health facilities to do is that they integrate the services so that anybody with HIV who comes to the facility, just like any other person who had come to seek care would do the registration, be reviewed by the same doctor(s), go for their medication from the same pharmacists and then leave.

“ With this, there will be nothing like antiretroviral therapy (ART) anymore,” he explained.

ART @ 20

Dr Ayisi Addo was speaking in an interview with the Daily Graphic as part of the 20 years of ART in Ghana.

He stated that the teaching hospitals might, however, have to continue to run their specialised ART centres separately because they emphasised specialisation for their medical staff.

He said the NACP had also started to put in additional measures aimed at turning some of the health facilities, aside from the current 735 ART centres in the country, into satellites and pick-up centres in communities closer to PLHIV so that they could easily walk in to pick their medications without having to go to the main health facilities.

“Piloting began in this community distribution programme last year and hopefully, that will be replicated in other communities,” he indicated.

Challenge

Dr Ayisi Addo said despite the success of the programme, they continued to have a rolling figure because some were being lost to follow-up either due to death or some abandoning the treatment once they started to feel better.

He said out of the about 6,000 health centres under the Ghana Health Service, 735 were ART treatment centres.

Dr Ayisi Addo expressed concern about some PLHIV doing self transfers to other health facilities and using different identities to take their medications.

Describing the practice as not good, he said it contributed to the bloated data on the number of people on ART.

He assured PLHIV that their privacy would be protected at health facilities so they should not be afraid to go for their medications.

ART in Ghana

In March 1986, Ghana diagnosed its first AIDS case and by May 1986, 26 cases had been identified.

The NACP was established a year after the cases were identified to prevent, treat, care and support clients infected and affected by the condition.

 In 2000, the Ghana AIDS Commission was established to coordinate the multi-sectoral response.

The first national decision on the provision of ART for PLHIV was taken in 2000 and a pilot provision of antiretrovirals (ARVs) was done in 2003 at the St Martins de Porres Hospital, Agomanya, and Atua Government Hospital, with scale-up to Korle Bu and Komfo Anokye Teaching hospitals in 2003 and 2004, respectively.