The ART Coordinator for Phalombe District Harold Mwaleya reported that his district has managed to decrease number of its defaulters on ART treatment from 1,773 in Quarter 3 to 1,025 in Quarter 4 of the year 2021 de-spite several challenges.

Mwaleya presented the report in Salima on 24th February, 2022 at a stakeholders meeting organized by the Network of Journalists Living with HIV (JONEHA) with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through AVAC under the COMPASS Africa Initiative.

He said the challenges fueling treatment interruption in the district include poor attitude by health care workers, routine migration to neighboring Mozambique to cultivate land for farming, long distances to reach far away facilities and self-transfer outs.

“The attitude of some health care workers are not so welcoming as such some clients fear visiting clinics to get drugs and they would rather access ART from other health facilities and appear as defaulters,” said the Phalombe ART Coordinator.
He observed that the number of retention declines right after the initiation as months pass-by; citing his district as an example which was at 89% after a month from initiation dropped to 84% after 3 months and 81% after 12 months.

The ART Coordinator indicated that the district with an overall 3% default rate in Q4 of 2021 had some facilities like Mwanga and Nkhwayi with a default rate of as low as 1%. Thus; Phalombe has managed to decrease the number of defaulters in Quarter 4 de-spite the mentioned challenges after applying various interventions that included ongoing multi-month scripting, peer counseling using youth ambassadors, provision of psycho social services and other interventions.
He added that ongoing scaling up of Community ART Distribution points, ongoing counseling of newly initiated clients, provision of health talks and pre-ART counseling of all newly diagnosed recipients of care have also contributed to the reduction of defaulters.