Last week, we had our scheduled
meeting led by Dr. Gilbert, Edmond and myself with all the nurses, Abel and the
psychosocial team to discuss the Family Needs Assessment. My main agenda for the meeting was to get clarification as
to why this data was collected and try to tease out nurses’ and counselors’
ideas on what information could help them practice better. I know that we could make correlations from
the data that we already had, however, I wanted to gain the team’s perspective to
better direct my analysis and suggestions.
They answered my questions patiently (although it was 2:30-4 on a
Thursday, so people were ready to go home) and we were able to determine
several areas of focus for small group sessions. These areas included substance abuse, child
abuse, HIV stigma and being an orphan.
Edmond presented an explanation as to the current state of the
government-funded social services in Rwanda and we discussed whether or not
WE-ACTx would benefit from using these.
Since it looks like the funding is limited and most social services are
only for temporary problems, there is not much support. One option is to search for NGO’s addressing social
issues preventing ARV adherence in Kigali and forming relationships with them.
In addition, we discussed whether or not it would be
valuable to organize small focus groups of children under the age of 18. It was agreed that children are more honest
without their parents present and asking them about our four areas of focus in
this setting could be very beneficial.
We all agreed
that the next steps for the remaining 4 weeks are to determine children for the
focus groups and perform the sessions in Kinyarwanda. To do this, we will need a psychosocial counselor, either Laetty or Henriette, present in addition to a translator.
Since
all the counselors are off work this week for a training, I spent my time composing a list of Focus Group questions, translating the remainder of the speadsheet data with Augustin and arranging a meeting for next week. In the meantime, I began working with our data analyst, Jackie, to gather data on patients that we still need viral loads for in order to use it for any correlations or deductions regarding ARV adherence.
Happy Independence Day, Rwanda!
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| This is the agenda I composed for our meeting. |
