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0 viewsThe 12th May was International Nurse’s Day. However hardworking nurses in South Africa are hardly celebrated or appreciated enough. Those who work in the public health sector in particular are perennially overworked and underpaid; and our health system is overburdened due to our inability to retain (and train) professional medical staff. By 2002, some 18,000 health professionals were working abroad. That same year, 29,000 posts in the public health system were vacant. By 2008, vacant posts for doctors alone in public health hospitals increased to approximately 38,000.
In 2008, the Praekelt Foundation, Frog Design, MTN, PopTech!, iTeach, Lifeline and the National AIDS Helpline (NAH) launched ‘Project Masiluleke’, an HIV intervention that uses mobile technology to provide support in the prevention, testing and treatment of HIV. Their two projects, Social Txt and TextAlert, are making waves in the field while a provocative self-testing kit, cuurently under development, could change how one learns about their HIV status in the future.
First ‘Project M’, as it is now affectionaltely known, started by changing the nature of the “Please Call Me” (PCM) which uses only a fraction of the 120 characters allowed in a sms. The unused space seemed primed for preventative HIV-messaging as nearly every South African owns a mobile phone and 30 million PCMs are sent daily. Project M’s SocialTxt started ‘tagging’ between 700,000 and one million PCMs sent over the MTN network every day with messages in all nine official languages. Since inception, over 1.5 billion PCMs have been tagged which has translated into more than 2 million calls to the NAH whose number is used in every PCM tagged. According to Project M, if SocialTxt is turned off, the NAH receives roughly 1,100 calls daily. If SocialTxt is enabled, the number of calls increases to between 3,000 and 5,000.
In the area of treatment, Project M developed TextAlert, an open-source mobile technology sms system. TextAlert uses sms’es to inform patients about their CD4 counts after they tested for HIV to initiate patients with low CD4 counts onto treatment sooner and improve the treatment adherence rate of patients. Themba Lethu Clinic in Johannesburg was the first site to use TextAlert and their adherence rate increased from 87% to 96%. Now, over 15,000 patients are enrolled. The Loss to Follow Up Rate at Themba Lethu stood above 30% before TextAlert could help maintain the current rate that oscillates between 5% and 9%. With the additional partners that utilise TextAlert could be reaching an additional 50,000 patients by the end of 2012.
Project M takes ‘mobility’ to its logical conclusion. They devised a clever mechanism to get those demographics, like men, who because of stigma are most resistant to visit clinics, to test for HIV. Their simply designed saliva-based ‘self-test’ kit will in future enable people to test themselves for HIV in private. The kit is still under intense scrutiny from its designers and extensive research is underway around KwaZulu-Natal.
The potential for technologies like those used by Project M can underpin a range of interventions across development sectors. Mobile technology is pervasive and has the capacity for adaption that is relatively easy and affordable. And in this case, it’s home-made innovation at its best.
Visit impumelelo.org.za for more information about the ingenious ways South Africans are solving public problems or follow @ImpumeleloInnov on Twitter