What is HIV training?

HIV Training

What is HIV training?

HIV training is educating the health care providers in the field, so that they enhance their personal skills for handling HIV oriented issues more efficiently. HIV training may include a number of sub-parts, covering several aspects of handling the disease. However, a health care worker can also specialize in one particular aspect and pursue a career in that. HIV training may not be very popular in every region of the world. However, it is the need of the hour for most nations in Sub-Saharan Africa.

What does HIV training consists of?

The training includes several papers and specializations. It may be a complete full-time training course, a part-time or a vocational course. However, the contents of the course will not vary much.

The training consists of:

• Pharmacolologic management of HIV: It is a clinical training program, which educates people to manage opportunistic infections and to handle various ARV therapies. It also teaches the basics of HIV virology and pathogenesis.
• Prevention of vertical transmission of HIV: This includes everything that will prevent HIV transmission
  
  from the mother to the child. It conducts lectures on infant feeding, HIV preconceptions, and several antiretroviral therapies that an HIV positive mother needs to take during pregnancy.
• HIV/AIDS Pediatric Management: This includes management of babies who are either born with HIV or are infected with it due to breast feeding or other reasons. This course trains on how to manage the disease in children with the help of ART and toxicities.
• Nursing training on HIV: This course provides nursing training to cure and heal HIV patients. This also includes sessions on how to reduce social stigma associated with HIV.
• Laboratory training: This course will tell the students/ health care workers about the best test, how it should be conducted, what time it should be conducted, and updates them on the latest therapies and tests. It also trains on how to conduct the test to yield accurate results.
• Anti Retroviral Therapy Training: This course will give the fundamental ideas about various antiretroviral therapies that suits best for which type of body constitution. It talks about the latest antiretroviral drugs, therapies and the pros, and cons of each one of them.
• CD4 Enumeration Course: This course teaches how to test, analyze and determine the CD4 count and viral load. It gives a basic idea about the flow cytometry, and tests the stage and the impact of HIV infection in the subject’s blood.
• Specimen management: This course teaches how to collect, process, treat, preserve, transport and carry specimens of body fluids like blood and mucosal fluids. It trains them on how to store and document these specimens, so that testing may be conducted successfully.
• Western Blot: It teaches the students the procedure of western blot testing.

HIV training is given to all health care workers in training centers, hospitals and HIV training institutes. These courses reduce the workload of the doctors by sharing the responsibilities with the trainees. This can enable better management of the disease by health care workers in remote areas, where the doctors are unavailable.

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