ARV-unit Canzibe Hospital

2010-05-23T07:12:00.000-07:00

TransCape treatment programme.
Written by: Drs Caroline van der Werff, working as Medical Officer in Canzibe Hospital since January 2008.

I remember the first day I arrived in Canzibe Hospital; excited and nervous at the same time; I didn’t know what to expect from this hospital, the Xhosa people and culture and this country (I am originally from The Netherlands). I couldn’t imagine how life would be in Canzibe before I came there. You see pictures, you read stories, but you don’t know how it feels.
One of the other doctors showed me around; I remember how I (on that same first day) walked into the Tuberculosis(TB)-ward. And I will never forget how it felt. Sick, dying people; suffering not only from TB, but the majority of these patients is also HIV-positive. The other doctors who have been working in Canzibe for years before me, tell me how this ward looked like before 2007. “There was very little hope for these patients; we could diagnose their TB and HIV, but we could only treat them for TB. Anti-retro-viral(ARV) treatment was not available in Canzibe.” “This situation changed in 2007, when one of the doctors in Canzibe took initiative to apply for an accredited ARV-unit in Canzibe. One of the essential requests from the government was a main ARV-building. The hospital didn’t have a budget for this, but with financial help from TransCape, they were able to place 2 parkhomes on hospital grounds. The accreditation was approved by the end of 2006, when the doctors were able to start the first HIV-positive patients on ARV’s in Canzibe.
The hospital didn’t have enough staff to work in the ARV-unit either, so TransCape started soon to recruit local people to help with administration and dispensary. At this moment, there are 5 people employed through TransCape in the ARV-unit.”

And there I was, ready to start work and help the patients in the best way I could. The first ward I was placed to do daily ward rounds was the TB- female ward. I was struggling; a lot of patients were not yet started on ARV’s, and for some of them it was already too late; their body was exhausted by fighting the HIV-virus, and they couldn’t recover from the TB and other opportunistic infections. I had a hard time seeing those patients dying. But on the other hand there were some patients I could start on ARV’s in the ward, they recovered slowly and I could discharge them home after a few weeks. One of the TransCape employees from the ARV-unit would do a ward round with me, to see which patients needed extra counselling, an ARV-file or an appointment with the doctor in the unit to start ARV’s.
I also started working in the ARV-unit, where a variety of patients consulted me; From sick, wasted people who couldn’t even walk anymore to relatively healthy-looking children who were HIV-infected since birth and found to be HIV-positive only through a random screening in their local clinic. It was sometimes difficult to counsel the patients; to explain to them about the side-effects of their treatment, to urge them to take that treatment daily even when it makes them feel sick(er) and to tell them that they would never be ‘cured’, the medicine will only suppress the virus. But I saw how patients were improving after being started on ARV’s. And they became an example for other patients, who were sometimes in denial, afraid to disclose to their relatives or refusing to get medical help.
And now, 2 years after I started working in Canzibe, there are 1500 patients on ARV’s in our ARV-unit; 100 of them are children. When I walked into the TB-ward the other day, I noticed that the majority of the patients have 3 containers of ARV’s appearing on their bedside locker. They are getting treatment for TB and for the HIV. There is hope again. And I know there are still a lot of people in this area who are HIV-positive and not (yet) on ARV’s. But every week when we start another 20 new patients, we are a step closer to tackle the HIV/AIDS epidemic in this country.

2010-02-20T10:22:00.001-08:00

To be updated shortly

TransCape Treatment Program

ARV-unit Canzibe Hospital