A mother and child in Ringiti, Kenya, a region with limited health care as well as the highest prevalance of HIV/Aids in the country, 15 per cent. Photo: Jacqueline Koch

1 December 2008

The global shortage of four million health workers is one of the most significant barriers to tackling the HIV pandemic.
 
Trained health workers are key to preventing, diagnosing and treating a disease which claimed over two million lives last year alone.
 
More trained health workers, especially in rural areas, would also allow developing countries to decentralise their HIV programmes; moving the focus from treatment delivered by doctors in hospitals to nurses and midwives in rural posts.
 
Integrating HIV into a basic package of primary health care would give far more people access to the treatment they so desperately need. It would also help to secure community involvement, a critical component in not only abolishing stigma but also in preventing new infections.
 
Most significantly perhaps, the integration of HIV into primary health care would serve to strengthen a country’s overall health system, bringing far greater health and economic benefits to the entire population.
 
A recent study by the WHO showed that universal HIV testing would virtually eliminate transmission and cut the number of people living with full-blown Aids by 95 per cent. Yet without a sufficient number of trained health workers such studies will never go beyond the pilot stage.
 
Tackling HIV effectively demands the health worker shortage is given urgent and coordinated priority now.

 Campaign for change: Put your hand up for health workers here
 Find out more about Merlin’s HIV work in Kenya
 On the brink – the effects of HIV on pastoralists