Antenatal clinics offering and referring for voluntary counseling and testing Antenatal clinics offering and referring for voluntary counseling and testing Definition: The percent of public antenatal clinics offering counseling and voluntary testing for HIV by trained staff or referring to voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) services Evaluators randomly select public antenatal clinics in a health facility survey. Evaluators conduct staff interviews and record reviews to ascertain whether any of the clinic staff are trained in counseling, and whether the clinic routinely counsels clients about HIV in pregnancy and offers HIV tests with post-test counseling or refers clients to qualified outside services. The annual client volume of the clinic is also recorded. This indicator is calculated as: (# of antenatal clinics offering voluntary testing for HIV and post-test counseling by trained staff / Total # of antenatal clinics) x 100 Evaluators may then weight the result by client volume. Data Requirement(s): Total number of antenatal clinics and number of antenatal clinics offering and referring for VCT Data Source(s): UNAIDS guide to the monitoring and evaluation of prevention programs for mother to child HIV transmission; UNAIDS tool for evaluating HIV voluntary counseling and testing Purpose: Private sector clinics will often take the lead in providing services for those HIV-infected pregnant women who can afford to pay for interventions. Because such interventions are relatively expensive, the goal of national programs is to extend their reach to less affluent members of society, through service provision in public facilities. Thus, evaluators should calculate this indicator based on service provision in public sector clinics. However, countries that are making an effort to increase training in counseling for staff at antenatal clinics in the private sector or among traditional birth attendants may want to include such groups in this indicator as well. Ideally, this measure would include all public antenatal services in a country. Since the number of such services is often too large to be practical, sampling is adopted. This indicator is most useful in countries actively expanding coverage of maternal to child prevention services. A steady rise in the indicator is likely to reflect a steady expansion of service provision. However, if sampling is necessary, the indicator may be slow to reflect progress. Keywords: safe motherhood (SM), newborn (NB), integration, HIV/AIDS Related content Safe Motherhood Newborn Health Filed under: Family Planning, FP, FP/RH, HIV/AIDS, Indicators, integration, newborn, Reproductive Health, RH, safe motherhood, sti
