Natasha Maritz

Background

About Natasha Maritz

Community Home Based Care (CHBC) has been an important component of the AIDS epidemic response, particularly before ART became available. The essence of “comprehensive home based care across a continuum” provides a unique opportunity to respond to the wide range of medical, emotional, and social support needs of people living with HIV/AIDS and their families. In this initiative we will be focusing firstly on the following services for PLWHAs and their families on clinical care, nursing care, counselling, emotional, and Psycho-spiritual and social support. Secondly, we will focus on self-care which requires skills in prevention and early diagnosis and treatment of opportunistic infections and other conditions, such as diarrhoea, headaches, or dermatitis Monitoring and evaluation is one of the cornerstones of a country’s response to fighting HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria and strengthening health and community systems; it provides the information needed to make evidence-based decisions for program management and improvement, policy formulation, and advocacy. It also generates good-quality data to satisfy accountability requirements. Investing in strengthening a CHBC national monitoring and evaluation system is important as it will eventually save resources that may otherwise be spent in inefficient program activities or overlapping activities that are not yielding impressive results. Monitoring and evaluation is intrinsic to the Global Fund’s system and other donors of performance-based funding, which ensures that funding decisions are based on a transparent assessment of results against time-bound targets.