Global Programs—Namibia works with University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) researchers and their in-country partners, either as project staff or in supporting administration of research and training projects.
Health Informatics and Technology
Global Programs provides technical assistance to the MoHSS Primary Health Care (PHC) and Health Information and Research Directorates (HIRD) to design, develop, pilot and implement a patient-level electronic data capture and reporting system called Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) Tracker (PTracker). PTracker aims to strengthen and integrate existing systems for PMTCT monitoring and evaluation to achieve quality improvement and to validate Namibia’s progress towards eliminating mother-to-child-transmission of HIV.
The Health Informatics team also developed a routine monitoring system for Option B+ monitoring and elimination of mother-to-child transmission (eMTCT) of HIV.
The Malaria Elimination Initiative is testing standard-of-care malaria rapid diagnostic test (RDT) and a new ultra-sensitive RDT to identify the rate of false positives due to the persistence of the HRP-2 antigen in a low transmission setting
Quality Improvement
The Namibia Project on Retention of Patients on ART (NAMPROPA) is a HEALTHQUAL quality improvement (QI) collaborative to accelerate improvement in retention, viral load monitoring, viral load suppression, and hypertension screening and treatment among people living with HIV on antiretroviral therapy at 24 facilities across three high HIV prevalence regions of Namibia.
Based on the successful implementation of NAMPROPA, the MoHSS with HEALTHQUAL has initiated another QI Collaborative. The new Collaborative, Namibia Linkage to Care, Viral load Suppression and Ending TB (NamLiVE), is aimed at improving linkage to care, viral load suppression and TB prevention therapy among people living with HIV and AIDS in Namibia.
Working with MoHSS, the Malaria Elimination Initiative tests and scales up organizational efficiencies to improve management of malaria elimination operations.
The Malaria Elimination Initiative also conducts research to identify the most effective tools and approaches in surveillance, drug administration and diagnostics for the elimination of malaria in Namibia.
Surveillance
UC Global Programs is working with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Atlanta and Namibia, the Ministry of Health and Social Services, and the National Institute of Pathology to implement HIV recent infection surveillance at ART sites in Namibia. Together the partners are working to develop a surveillance system for monitoring recent infections in real-time. The data will be used to track the current epidemic, target interventions, and inform the planning of prevention activities. The system will have a phased rollout starting June 2019 and eventually covering the whole country.
Global Programs provides technical assistance to the MoHSS in planning and implementing surveillance activities, including:
- Integrated Biological and Behavioral Surveillance (IBBS), designed to improve the understanding of disease burden and unique service needs among key populations at risk for HIV such as men who have sex with men, female sex workers and transgender populations, while offering participants direct linkage to clinical care services.
- Sentinel incidence surveillance to evaluate the response (SISTER) to the HIV epidemic, a small area sentinel incidence survey to obtain directly observed measures of HIV incidence. SISTER complements national-level HIV impact assessments.
- Entomological surveillance of malaria-transmitting vectors to identify the best tools to reduce malaria transmission.
- Namibia Population-Based HIV Impact Assessment (NamPHIA), a nationwide survey intended to measure the prevalence of HIV and related health indicators, HIV incidence and prevalence of viral load suppression. The survey also assesses the uptake of key HIV prevention, care and treatment services at the population level.
Final Report: Namibia Population-Based HIV Impact Assessment (NAMPHIA) 2017