I’m excited to report that I’ve finally gotten the Dosing Syringe project underway! Basically, I will be surveying caregivers of patients on Kaletra (Lopinavir) syrup on their current practices on giving the medication, training them in using the Dosing Syringes, and then surveying them on their expectation. I described the Dosing Syringes in a previous post, but I will give another brief description here.

The correct dosing of anti-retroviral medication is extremely important in ensuring good activity of the drugs. However, many caregivers and patients have trouble with attaining accurate doses due to a variety of reasons, including illiteracy and poor understanding. The Dosing Syringes developed by a group of Rice students seeks to ensure accurate dosing of oral medication with a clip that is inserted into the syringe. The size of the clip controls how far up the syringe plunger can be pulled up and thus controls the dose of the medication.
Kaletra syrup is the most common liquid anti-viral medication used at Baylor. My goal is to train all the caregivers on how to use the syringes and to survey them before and after 30 days of usage to evaluate the usefulness and appropriateness of the syringes. Since I will be leaving at the end of July, I will only be able to conduct the pre-surveys, but hopefully another scholar at Baylor will be able to continue my project.

So far, I have written the pre-survey and have had it translated into Sesotho. I have also gone through EMR (the electronic charting system used at the clinic) and flagged all patients on Kaletra syrup. This way, whenever a doctor sees a Kaletra patient, he or she will know to notify me or other scholars who will be continuing the project to come see the patient.
Because they are so few patients on Kaletra (all children capable of swallowing pills are given Aluvia, the tablet form of Lopinavir), I will also be surveying patients taking 2.5 mL doses of multivitamin supplements. Although accurate dosing and adherence is not as crucial for multivitamin supplements, patients still struggle with taking correct amounts and can benefit from having a dosing syringe. Also, having more patients will help our evaluation for the effectiveness/usefulness of the project.

Over the next three weeks, I will continue to survey patients and distributing the syringes. I will also be working on a post-survey to hand off to another scholar who will be picking up the project after I leave. Below is a picture of the syringes.