In Côte d’Ivoire, PMTCT has been a national policy since 2004 with mixed success. In November 2012, the Ministère de la Santé et de l’Hygiène Publique (MSHP), Côte d’Ivoire Ministry of Health and Public Hygiene, formally adopted WHO’s Option B regimen with scale-up to national implementation occurring over the course of 2013. Given the challenges with earlier approaches to PMTCT, particularly with regards to patient retention, a robust national assessment of Option B was planned and carried out as the second phase in a two-phase national study on PMTCT by a consortium including MSHP, the University of Washington (UW) and Health Alliance International (HAI). In addition to this retrospective Option B assessment, this project also included the implementation and assessment of an intervention designed to improve retention in care through information sharing and active patient tracking (APT).
The objectives of the study were: (1) to understand how the implementation of the Option B strategy impacted key measures of PMTCT effectiveness; (2) to identify persistent and emerging bottlenecks in the system that affect service delivery and patient retention; and (3) to measure the impact of implementing an inter-professional patient tracking intervention on patient retention in PMTCT services.
Citation
S. Gloyd, S.A. Granato, D.A. Billy, J. Robinson, K. Abo, S. Kouyaté, V. Kouraï, C. Bla, G. Djety, J. Hughes, B. Rowan, E. Squires, B. Wagenaar, and A. Koné. 2016. “National-level analysis of the PMTCT Option B program and intervention to improve retention in Côte d’Ivoire.” HIVCore Final Report, Washington, DC: USAID | Project Search: HIVCore