| Abstract: | There are people living with HIV in all parts of the world, from all walks of life and cultures, all
ages and all genders where some are more affected than others, and some have better access to
services than others. Acquiring HIV is no longer means certain death as it has been observed
that a person on HIV treatment in a high-income setting now has nearly the same life expectancy
as a person who does not have the virus. More than 78 million people have been infected with
HIV and 39 million have died since the start of the AIDS epidemic at a global level and
HIV/AIDS remained uncontrolled and continued to be a major public health problem at a global
and national level.
Laboratory commodities are used in the provision of HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment
services while efficient and effective procurement of laboratory items critically impacts the
quality of all laboratory services albeit laboratory items are numerous and creates serious
challenges to procurement agencies. Policies help set standards for laboratory practice,
including the tests and techniques that will be used at each level in the system, which ultimately
dictate the commodities that are required to support laboratory services where the unique
characteristics of laboratory commodities impact the way in which the supply chain should be
designed and managed to ensure the availability of these commodities. Testing results are only
of value to those making clinical decisions if the test results reported are timely and correct The
organization of laboratories in a country will be determined by local policies, administrative
structure of the health system, geography, and population consideration where by the
laboratory network is often or may be organized by administrative levels like other health
services.
Assessment of the national SCMS of medical laboratory services for the ART program examines
how well the system is organized and structured against the consensus of national framework
indicators and how well the laboratory SCMS for ART monitoring is carried out against known
ART SCMS indicators.
Checklists & interview were used to collect secondary and primary information respectively
and descriptively analyzed for conformances.
The assessment showed the absence of most of the national laboratory program working
frameworks and absence of important monitoring tools & practice to monitor the SCMS. Only
limited laboratory tests are found to be used for ART patients monitoring while most of supplies
for many testing services are found to be irregular and stock outs. The coverage of ART
laboratory facility is also found to be less than 9% compared to number of health centers and
hospitals across the country. Strong recommendations are drown to FMoH and other agencies
to fulfill all the working frameworks and SCMS monitoring mechanisms to strengthen the
laboratory program in general and the ART SCMS in particular. |
