Ukraine National PMTCT Scale-up Project

What We Do › Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV › Ukraine National PMTCT Scale-up Project

With an estimated population of 46.7 million and an adult HIV prevalence rate of 1.4 percent, Ukraine is the country worst affected by the AIDS epidemic in all of Europe. If current trends are not reversed, WHO experts predict that 1.44 million people—3 percent of the total population—will be infected with HIV by 2010.

As the epidemic becomes more generalized, more women of child-bearing age are being infected and mother-to-child transmission of HIV has emerged as a significant problem. From 1998 to 2005, the number of new HIV cases reported among pregnant women rose from 686 to 2,516. According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, more than 1 percent of pregnant women in Odessa and Mykolayiv oblasts are registered as HIV-positive. In 2005, 2,399 children were born to HIV-positive women, representing a 300 percent increase from the 727 cases reported in 2000.

In late 2000, AIHA launched a USAID-funded pilot PMTCT project to improve quality of care in Odessa Oblast by expanding collaboration between healthcare facilities and nongovernmental organizations providing services to people living with HIV/AIDS. This pilot project adopted a comprehensive medical-social model and is now being replicated in eight high-prevalence regions nationwide in cooperation with Ukraine’s Ministry of Health and with support from USAID-Ukraine.

With the overarching goal of lowering the vertical transmission rate to 5-8 percent at each participating site, the project is implementing strategies to:

Replication was launched in Cherkassy, Dnipropetrovsk, Kiev, and Mykolayiv oblasts in June 2005. In November 2005, the project was launched in the second-phase oblasts of Chernigiv, Crimea, Kherson, and Odessa.

Clinical training to build capacity in the target regions is conducted at the Southern Ukraine AIDS Education Center (SUAEC) as well as at selected healthcare institutions in each oblast. SUAEC—which has been recognized by WHO and other international organizations as a center of PMTCT excellence in the region—was established in June 2003 at the Odessa Oblast Clinical Hospital by AIHA and various strategic partners.

During the first year of implementation, the initial scale-up strategy has been to lay a strong foundation for optimization of medical-social care for HIV-positive women through targeted training of key personnel. Important steps toward reducing unplanned pregnancies and increasing adherence to preventive therapy have been made. Furthermore, quality of care for infants born to HIV-positive mothers has improved, stigma and discrimination has decreased, scarce resources are used more rationally, and monitoring and assessment processes have been unified.


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