Despite the undeniable gains in making ARVs available in most countries, the issues around church leaders’ understanding of HIV transmission, treatment and stigma remain a major challenge. Thus, within church health facilities, this leads to the poor counseling of such patients within congregations and consequentially, delayed
uptake of treatment. In addition, health care workers (HCWs) living with HIV and AIDS in church health facilities tend to be even more susceptible to stigmatization and delay treatment uptake.
In collaboration with INERELA + Kenya, we hosted a “Framework for Dialogue Impact Assessment” meeting in Nairobi in February 2017 with the major objective of finding out the current challenges, strategies of decreasing stigma, capacitating church/religious leaders on HIV and AIDS treatment and care.
Included in the discussion were ways of addressing discrimination faced by HCWs in faith-based and public health facilities.
It became clear, very quickly in this meeting, that stigma was still an issue that HCWs living with HIV and AIDS continue to face. The level of discrimination at work is significant, which makes it harder for some to self-identify and sadly , they then avoid being tested.
Results of this meeting included:
- Reviving of the dormant network of HCW-Living With HIV in Kenya
- Building the capacity of members on steps to create a support system with each other and patients.
Lessons Learned
Treatment Literacy Programs for church leaders on HIV and AIDS remains a major need in promoting treatment adherence, acceptance of patients in society and strengthening of social structures. This is also a strong antidote against the faith-healing movement which contributes to the drop out of patients from treatment programs by proclaiming them healed and that they do not need to take their medications.
Therefore, messaging on HIV and AIDS i.e. testing, self-declaration, uptake of medication should be coordinated from the pulpit to the health facility
