Health Communication Training 8th October - 12th October 2012
October 8, 2012
Good communication with patients, families, caregivers, consultants and referring physicians is absolutely vital to good patient care.
To this extent CHEP in partnership with LHL is offering a Health Communication Training from 8th to 12th October. Health Communication Skills are very important to health workers. With this training, a health worker will have the following skills and achieve the desired objectives and goals;
Excellence in listening and talking with patients should be very high on the list of goals that we want to accomplish in providing good patient care. Its importance is uncontested, yet we all occasionally forget how crucial it is. As a result, we frequently fall short of our patients' and colleagues' expectations. This ultimately has an undesirable effect on health provider’s reputations both in Zambia and globally
The following outline may help provide some guidelines on improving this aspect of our bedside skills.
Methods of Communicating
--Personal Discussions with Patients – You can’t beat one-on-one, face-to-face patient encounters as the best way of communicating. Patients can see your concern and can better sense your wish to make them well. You can demonstrate and teach important facts about their medical problems and why certain tests or medications are necessary.
--Phone Calls with patients and families definitely have a place in patient care. Patients should be encouraged to call if they have questions or problems. However, telephone encounters should only be supplementary to regular patient visits.
--Email is getting to be a very important quick and easy method of imparting health care information to individual patients. Though this method is not yet fully utilized in Zambia due to limited resources to acquire ICT equipment and services. With certain exceptions, you can let them know about normal test results or reminders about appointments. Concerns about security are rapidly decreasing as methods of encryption become more widespread. However, you should familiarize yourself with certain liability risks associated with online patient communication before starting this.
--Regular mail and Facsimiles are not yet totally out of vogue and still hold a significant place in reliably providing secure information to patients and colleagues. This has been most often used to send or receive referral letters, test results or consultants' notes about mutual patients.
Read more: Health Communication Training 8th October - 12th October 2012
AIDS Groups Ditch ‘Noisy’ Female Condom
Wed, Jan. 23, 2013 (HealthDay News) -- AN AIDS support organisation will introduce a new and modified female condom after the first one launched in the country several years ago was discontinued as it “made a lot of noise during the act”.
Women and AIDS Support Network (WASN) information manager Evince Mugumbate said her organisation will launch the female condom in Gokwe to promote higher usage of the product in the fight against HIV.
Zambia gets $102m grant for HIV/AIDS
Zambia gets $102m grant for HIV/AIDS
October 11, 2012
THE Global Fund (GF) to fight HIV\AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB) and malaria has given Zambia a grant of US$102 million (about K500 billion) through the Churches Health Association of Zambia (CHAZ) to continue supporting the national HIV/AIDS responses in the country.
The signing of the single stream funding grant was a consolidation of four grants which had since made Zambia the only country in the region to have successfully done so.
From the grant, over 404,275 people would be counseled and tested, 80,479 placed on treatment, 84,000 males circumcised and 70,050 orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) would receive care and support.
Global Fund head – grant management programmes division from Geneva, Eldon Edington praised the Zambian Government for implementing measures to ensure resources in the health sector reached the intended purposes.
Mr Edington said in Lusaka yesterday at a signing ceremony that he was impressed with the Zambian Government’s efforts to fight HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria in all parts of the country.
“I am very glad to be here to sign this agreement with Zambia today. This new grant will increase Global Fund’s investments of high impact interventions that will help Zambia reach universal access of HIV treatment,” he said.
