More than two weeks ago, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi announced that the treasury has given R622 million of emergency funding to his department to prop up South Africas HIV treatment programme.
About R590 million is for provinces HIV budgets and R32 million for the chronic medicine distribution system , which allows people to fetch their antiretroviral treatment from pick-up points other than clinics, closer to their homes.
This extra budget is just over a fifth of the roughly R2.8 billion funding gap that the health department says the country needed after the Trump administration pulled the plug on financial support for HIV in February . The Pepfar budget for this financial year was just under R8 billion , but the health department calculated that it could fill the void with R2.8 billion if it trimmed extras and ruled out duplicate positions.
So, how to get the best bang for these limited bucks especially with the health department wanting to get 1.1 million people with HIV on treatment before the end of the year and so reach the United Nations targets for ending Aids as a public health threat by 2030?
By getting really serious about giving people more than one way of getting their repeat prescriptions for antiretroviral ARV medicine so-called differentiated service delivery, said Kate Rees, co-chair of the 12th South African Aids Conference to be held later this year, from Kigali last week, where she attended the 13th IAS Conference on HIV Science .
