The concept of comprehensive care centre(CCC)

  

Date Posted: 5/7/2013 8:56:26 PM

Posted By: kaoo  Membership Level: Gold  Total Points: 3287

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The comprehensive care centre is a site where people living with HIV/AIDS go for holistic care and management.It has a team of workers that lead to success of the services in the centre.
This team includes;doctors,nurses,nutritionists,pharmacist,physiotherapist,laboratory technicians,public health officers and occupational therapists.It offer the following services:

1.Comprehensive care-this is a holistic approach to managing persons infected with HIV and those affected.Basically, the approach used is majorly clinical care and psychological and socio-economical support.Clinical care given is based on the medical and nursing care.Comprehensive care also includes;prevention of HIV/AIDS,conducting of care visits to affected and infected people and providing reproductive health education.

2.Care and support provided to people living with HIV/AIDS.This includes;socioeconomic support and VCT services.

3.Palliative care and end of life of care.This is an approach used by comprehensive care centre which improves the quality of life of patient and their families overcome life threatening illness through prevention,assessment and treatment of patient ,and other physical, psychological, and spiritual problems.

The comprehensive care centre has a committee that coordinates its activities to ensure success and smooth running.The committee has the mandate to do the following;identify and oversee the running

of the services,staffing focus for partners and friends to collaborate with monitoring and evaluation, encourage operational research ,formulate and review policies on advisory to the management.

The main services offered in the comprehensive care centre;

1.Clinical care-the clinical care is given based on medical and nursing care and includes the following;counselling and voluntary testing,prophylaxis of opportunistic infection,management of HIV related illness such as opportunistic infections.
2.Nutritional counselling-patient are educated on nutrition to improve their quality of life.Nutritional education is given to them on the type and required intake of the food.Those malnourished are provided nutritional support.
3.Psychological counselling-this is given tn patients after counselling and testing especially to the positive to meet the emotional needs.
4.Spiritual counseling-spiritual care is offered to patients by clinicians as it is important to make them understand the spiritual part of healing in relation to medical care.
5.Palliative care-patients and their affected families are given psychological and spiritual counselling to overcome stigma and help them as active as possible till their death.
6.Referral care-comprehensive care centre acts as a referral centre for all VCT centres,patients from inpatient, and outpatient are referred to.
7.Stress management-people living with HIV/AIDS are stressed because of condition presented by the disease,this reduce immune system hence leading to early death.Patients are counselled on how to overcome stress.

The Challenges facing the comprehensive care centre:
1.Shortage of man power-this results in overwhelming tasks among the available clinicians.It is advised that the counselor attends to not more than 15 patients per day but there are many patients leading to overwhelming tasks.
2.Cultural norms and tradition-some cultures discourage patients from attending to comprehensive care centre since they portray HIV patients as betrayers of their culture.
3.Religion-some religion does not allow alternative medication except from praying alone.
4.Stigma and denial.This has resulted in increase transmission and reinfection of infected individuals.Stigma also makes the infected to default clinic since they fear.
5.Disclosure system-many infected patient do not disclose their status either to their partners or families leading to transmission of the disease.
6.Shortage of laboratory technicians.This is for routine CD4 count check up as to maintain or improve their immune system.

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