Investigating the quality of HIV rapid testing practices in public antenatal health care facilities, South Africa.

ABSTRACT: Monitoring HIV prevalence using antenatal HIV sentinel surveillance is important for efficient epidemic tracking, programme planning and resource allocation. HIV sentinel surveillance usually employs unlinked anonymous HIV testing which raises ethical, epidemiological and public health challenges in the current era of universal test and treat. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that countries should consider using routine prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) data for surveillance. We audited antenatal care clinics to assess the quality of HIV rapid testing practices as the first step to assess whether South Africa is ready to utilize PMTCT programme data for antenatal HIV surveillance. In 2017, we conducted a cross-sectional survey in 360 randomly sampled a

SUBMITTER: Nsibande DF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9423613 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature