Home Innovation hub READY+ Caseload Planner

READY+ Caseload Planner

Key information

  • Organisation: Zvandiri
  • Country: Zimbabwe
  • Region: Southern Africa
  • Stage of innovation: Stage 6: In the market and Ready to scale
  • Start date: 2021
  • Type of innovation: Services delivery innovation: new or different way of providing a service
  • Budget: 10,000 USD
  • Funder: Embassy of the Netherlands in Mozambique

Summary of intervention

Adolescence is often a challenging time of transition and change. Children, adolescents and young people living with HIV (CAYPLHIV) can struggle with adherence to antiretroviral treatment (ART) and consequently to suppress their viral load. Efforts to support CAYPLHIV frequently treat them as one homogenous group, with a ‘one size fits all’ strategy towards tackling adherence and viral suppression. This is unhelpful, lacks flexibility, and does not address the holistic and specific needs of young people as they develop.

In Zimbabwe, Zvandiri’s Community Adolescent Treatment Supporters — known as CATS — are using the READY+ Caseload Planner to track individual beneficiaries across the HIV cascade, from testing, care and treatment to viral suppression. The tool enables CATS to group clients according to the level of support that they require, and focus attention on their specific needs through appropriate and targeted sustained packages of support.

The Caseload Planner was piloted in three districts and demonstrated that, by using the tool, CATS and their supervisors in health care facilities can go through their caseloads and effectively plan what services to offer to which beneficiaries and when to do this, on a week-to-week basis. The tool is also enabling CATS to easily review and monitor to what extent planned services have been delivered, and to follow up promptly.

learnings

One of the main challenges in using the Caseload Planner is that health facilities often have inadequate documentation, which is the primary source of information for the caseload planning process.

next steps

The innovation has been successfully implemented across the selected districts supported under the READY+ programme in Zimbabwe and the next steps are to scale up to all districts in Zimbabwe. Through the Zvandiri Regional Programme, there is also potential to roll out use of the caseload planner to 10 partner countries in the region.

sustainability

The sustainability of this innovation depends on continued buy-in from health facility managers to enable health care workers, CATS and the IP representative to continue to meet monthly to plan for the caseload and follow up on the process each month. For quality control, there are different levels of approvals that are instituted to ensure that all parties are accountable.

Find out more about Zvandir HERE.