I’m at outreach this week in Leribe, one of the ten districts of Lesotho. Actually, two of my fellow interns, Eric and Vani, are here. Baylor has a satellite clinic on the hospital grounds of Leribe’s district hospital (Motebang). One of the goals of Baylor is to mentor nurses (and, though very rarely, doctors) at various district health clinics in providing appropriate and effective HIV/AIDS care. Baylor sends out trained nurses and doctors to the various clinics it sponsors to give lectures and to help out with seeing patients.

My (and another intern’s) project here in Leribe is to start a data collection project that will help Baylor assess the effectiveness of its outreach programs. Baylor sponsors many clinics throughout the districts, but it does not know whether the mentorship is improving the quality of care at those clinics. Our job is to go around to the clinics and collect data such as the number of patients tested for HIV, the number of patients enrolled in HIV/AIDS care, the number of patients given ART, and the HIV stage of those patients. With mentorship, Baylor hopes that the number of patients being tested and treated increases and the average stage of the patients decreases. The data we collect will help in assessing whether this goal is being met. If the project is a success in Leribe, we will be going to other districts to do the same thing.

So far, we’ve been to four outreach sites: Pontmain, MCH, Maputsoe, and Seetsa. I’ve learned just how chaotic it is at these clinics. There are often more patients than the nurses can handle and proper medical records are not kept for most patients. This is in part due to the lack of time and nurses and in part due to inadequate training and understanding. The national guidelines require the clinics to keep HTC (HIV Testing and Counseling), pre-ART care, and ART registers to recorded all the patients who have been tested, enrolled in care, and started on ART. However, we’re been discovering at not all the clinics record these data correctly, making our job a little more difficult. Despite the fact that we do not have complete data from all the clinics, what we learned is still useful because now Baylor knows which clinics need to be mentored/trained to keep better records.