Successes and failures of HIV and AIDS campaigning in the community testing in Mahikeng Local Municipality

Abstract

The study examined the successes and failures of HIV and AIDS campaigning in the community testing in Mahikeng local municipality. This study approached it from the perspective of the effect of HIV counselling and testing (HCT) campaign on the implementation of HIV services in Mahikeng Health Sub District, North West Province, South Africa. This is because HCT was one of the interventions of HIV prevention. This study applied the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 20.0 to analyse the secondary data used with specific reference to frequencies, standard deviation, mean and percentages to describe the data. Furthermore, the study used the t-test statistics to compare indicators before and after HCT. Pearson correlation was used to establish the relationship between some of the indicators and One way analysis of variance with Duncan Multiple range as a post hoc test was used to compare the indicators in terms of different categories of the population. The most prominent proportional increase after HCT was recorded for clients screened for TB (92.04%), clients tested for HIV (73.07%), and the total number of patients initiated in ART (72.70%), antenatal clients initiated on HAART (64.83%) and HIV pre-test counselled (56.83%). However, low proportional changes were recorded by antenatal clients HIV 1st test (5.98%). The response to HCT was higher among adult female clients who tested for HIV than adult male and children <15 years. The number of adult female who tested positive for HIV was higher than adult male and children <15 years. The study recommended funding for the procurement of point of care CD4 (T cell of the immune system) count equipment to improve anti-retroviral treatment initiation to newly diagnosed HIV-positive patients, that home based HIV testing programme be implemented and marketing of the HCT services be revived to further increase the HCT access to the community.