Voices from the Capacity Project

Nurse Liliana Hines lives in Colón, a port city of 200,000 on the Caribbean side of Panama. “When I first started out in 2002, this was and is still the first clinic of antiretroviral therapy here in the city of Colón.” She works at Manuel Amador Guerrero Hospital. “We started out with four patients and today we have over 300 patients receiving antiretroviral therapy.”

Panama and other countries in the region are responding to the demand for HIV services by increasing the number of hospitals providing these services. Formerly, only a few specialized hospitals offered HIV services. Yet many Central American hospitals that provide decentralized HIV services struggle with issues such as weak infection prevention practices, poor nutritional care for patients and persistent discriminatory practices.

The American Evaluation Association accepted two Capacity Project abstracts to be presented at the annual meeting in Orlando on November 14. "Human Resources (HR) Development Promising Practices for a Functional National HIV Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) System" discusses promising, HR development strategies, providing models for overcoming all dimensions of this M&E HR gap.