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U.S. / Zim partnership boosts medical labs in HIV/AIDS fight
US Embassy
December 05, 2011

The United States is providing over $9.5 million over five years to ensure the strengthening of medical laboratories in Zimbabwe. Such technical strengthening in labs is vital to continuing strong HIV prevention, care and treatment programs, U.S. Ambassador Charles Ray said on Thursday.

"The minimum requirements to be met by all laboratories and testing sites in Zimbabwe will ensure universal access to quality testing in support of the health delivery systems, which in turn promotes HIV prevention, care and treatment programs," said the U.S. Ambassador while officially opening the two-week Strengthening Laboratory Management Towards Accreditation (SLMTA) workshop currently underway in Bulawayo.

The workshop, which is being conducted jointly by the Zimbabwe National Quality Assurance Program (ZINQAP) and the Ministry of Health's Department of Laboratory Services, with support from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC- Zimbabwe), is the first in-country SLMTA Training of Trainers (ToT) workshop.

The 27 participants are all senior-level lab professionals and represent Barbados in the Caribbean, Uganda, Cameroon, Botswana and Zimbabwe. The workshop started November 28th and ends this week on Friday. Participants will use the information received to train other professionals for improved service delivery as their respective countries' medical labs prepare for accreditation.

This year alone, through CDC- Zimbabwe, the United States' President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is providing over $3.7 million dollars in laboratory support in Zimbabwe.

"This is really an exciting time in the AIDS epidemic," said Peter Kilmarx, CDC-Zimbabwe country director at the opening ceremony. "It's now 30 years since AIDS was first described in a CDC publication and we are turning the tide on HIV with increasingly effective prevention tools, including biomedical tools that depend on laboratory support. So other public health officials and doctors depend on you to achieve these results."

Zimbabwe representatives at the workshop confirmed that with the exception of one accredited private medical lab, there are currently no other accredited medical laboratories in the country, including in the public sector health system.

"This is not peculiar to Zimbabwe," said Sibongile Zimuto, director of ZINQAP. "Most countries in sub- Saharan Africa do not have accredited laboratories. In Zimbabwe, we are fortunate because we do have a good lab infrastructure. We have good laboratories and with programs such as SLMTA, we can strengthen our labs and have them accredited."

In November 2011, ZINQAP was recommended to be a SADC regional centre of excellence and quality systems, which will enable the organization to work with other countries in the SADC region to provide proficiency testing programs and trainings in quality systems.

An official from the Ministry of Health said the country was aiming to have two accredited laboratories by the end of 2012. "We envisage that by the end of 2012, we should have at least two public sector laboratories accredited," said Raiva Simbi, Deputy Director for Laboratory Services in the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare.

Citing brain drain, Simbi said the ministry had adopted several ways, including mentoring and in-house training, to ensure adequate personnel at the public medical laboratories. "In Zimbabwe we are happy because we have adopted several ways of actually getting to accreditation faster, one of them being the SLMTA program and the cohort that has done the training in the past 18 months. We hope we are going to have another cohort soon," said Simbi.

Kate Yao, Health Education Specialist with the Global AIDS program at CDC Altlanta, said the SLMTA approach was developed by the World Health Organization for resource-constrained countries. "In the past, international accreditation was an unreachable dream for many sub- Saharan African laboratories, but with SLMTA, it is now within their reach," said Yao, who hailed Zimbabwe for its commitment to ensuring improved standards in the sector.

"We have been doing the TOT workshops in South Africa where 20 countries participated. Zimbabwe has the honor of being the first ever participating country to host a TOT workshop because it has excellent trainers. Four of our six African master trainers are Zimbabweans - so you have the capacity."

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