HIV AIDS
Paediatric AIDS Treatment for Africa (PATA)
Paediatric AIDS Treatment for Africa - or PATA - is a network of medical teams across Africa who work with children that have HIV/AIDS.
PATA has its roots in Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa, where One to One Children’s Fund began funding much needed ARV medication in a pilot project for 250 families. The project demonstrated extraordinary results and boosted the case for sharing the treatment model with other treatment sites across the continent. Whilst the ARV effect was dramatic and over 90% of the children soon returned to full health, it became clear that the complexities surrounding HIV/AIDS treatment required a holistic rather than a rigidly clinical approach.
The successful model has been based around the formation of dedicated 4-person professional teams consisting of a physician, a nurse, a psychologist/ counsellor and a pharmacist. As a unit, such a multi-disciplinary team can handle almost any clinical, social or educational problem likely to be encountered in an HIV-affected family.
Since 2004, One to One Children's Fund has been supporting and co-funding the PATA infrastructure and the PATA Forums. PATA Forums are pan-African, regional and local meetings of multidisciplinary treatment teams who engage in expert plenary lectures, inter and intra-disciplinary workshops and then end with quality improvement goals for their clinic which are monitored over the course of the next year. The One to One Children's Fund’s team helps with the organisation of the PATA Forums, and funds and co-manages the PATA Expert Patient programme, a community health worker project.
Today, over 170 clinics from 24 sub-Saharan countries have joined the PATA network. These PATA-affiliated clinics are treating over 60,000 children who have HIV, more than 25% of all children receiving anti-retroviral treatment in Africa today. The network facilitates knowledge-sharing and has lead to the development of ground-breaking new models of treating and raising awareness of HIV.
The vision of PATA is for all HIV-infected and affected children in Africa to have access by 2015 to comprehensive, high quality health services including ARV treatment. PATA believes that this can best be achieved by supporting committed health care providers to enhance, expand and extend their work to impact others through a ripple effect in the community (the “PATA effect”).
Visit www.teampata.org for more information
on PATA.
see our work in action