Women's experience of HIV as a chronic illness in South Africa: hard-earned lives, biographical disruption and moral career.

This article presents findings from a longitudinal qualitative study (48 in-depth interviews with 12 women on antiretroviral treatment (ART)) exploring the experience of living with HIV as a chronic illness in South Africa by applying the structural and interactionist perspectives on chronic illness. The structural perspective indicates that the illness experience needs to be contextualised within the wider framework of the women's hard-earned lives: throughout the interviews, the women tended to refuse singularising HIV/AIDS and continuously framed the illness within the context of general hardship and adversity. Employing an interactionist perspective, the repeated interviews demonstrated the partial applicability of the concept of biographical disruption to the illness experience: most women experienced feelings of denial and disbelief upon diagnosis, but the availability of ART clearly mitigated the impact of HIV on their biographies. In addition, our findings demonstrate that the interaction between structural aspects, (stigmatising) social relations, and the illness (and its treatment) determines the never-ending cycle of identity appraisals, revisions and improvements, rendering the moral career of the HIV-positive women on ART a continuous work in progress.

Factors influencing agency nursing and moonlighting among nurses in South Africa.

BACKGROUND: In South Africa, nurses are the largest category of the health care providers. Their optimal performance is critical for the successful implementation of impending health sector reforms. OBJECTIVE: This paper examines the occurrence of agency nursing, moonlighting, and overtime among nurses in South Africa, and the factors influencing moonlighting. DESIGN: This cross-sectional survey was a one-stage cluster random sample of 80 hospitals in four South African provinces, selected with stratification from the public and private health sectors. On the survey day, all nurses working in critical care, theatre, emergency, maternity, and general medical and surgical wards completed a self-administered questionnaire after giving informed consent. In addition to demographic information, the questionnaire elicited information on the frequency of agency nursing, moonlighting, and overtime, and the nurses' reasons for doing moonlighting. Survey data were weighted and analysed using STATA version 12. RESULTS: The majority of survey participants (n = 3,784) were South African (98.0%), female (92.7%), and employed in government (52.8%). Their mean age was 41.5 years (SD 10.4). The occurrence of moonlighting among nurses in the 12 months preceding the survey was 28.0% [95% CI: 24.2-32.1], the frequency of agency nursing was 37.8% [95% CI: 32.4-43.6], while 56.0% of nurses did overtime [95% CI: 51.4-60.4]. In the multiple logistic regression analysis, predictors of moonlighting were province, sector of primary employment, unit of work, category of nurse, and having children. The odds of moonlighting was 1.51 [95% CI: 1.03-2.21] times higher for private sector nurses than for public nurses, while the odds ratio for auxiliary nurses was 0.61 [95% CI: 0.47-0.79] compared to professional nurses. The odds of moonlighting was 1.49 [95% CI: 1.18-1.89] for nurses with children, compared to those without. CONCLUSIONS: Agency nursing, moonlighting, and overtime are common among South African nurses, but have received insufficient policy attention. These issues need to be addressed as part of the implementation of comprehensive health workforce strategies.

'We are left in the cold': nurses' perceptions and responses to antiretroviral treatment roll-out in the Free State, South Africa.

The unprecedented roll-out of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in South Africa is a complex process where no previous endeavour exists that can measure, predict, or direct an intervention of this scale. In the Free State province, unique characteristics and problems distinguish its ART programme, although countrywide problems also occur within the province. The Free State province faces high vacancy rates among its health-care workers, the programme has lower patient enrolment rates because of an obsession with quality to the detriment of quantity, and various incidents of ART shortages have also shook the province. The ART roll-out intervention thus far has been largely nurse-driven (however not nurse initiated), and they form what many refer to as the 'backbone' of the programme. In order to respond to the challenges faced by these front-line ART providers, continuous transformations inevitably take place to respond to new needs associated with the roll-out programme, but also to strengthen the primary health-care system in general. The objective of this article is to present a typology of contradictory contextual factors in the antiretroviral programme as identified through group interviews that were conducted with PNs at public health-care clinics in the five districts of the Free State province during 2005 and 2006. We intend to show that transformations often have contradictory and problematic outcomes as expressed and perceived by the nurses themselves. This unprecedented endeavour of ART roll-out inevitably has to treasure and support its most valued implementers, i.e. the front-line providers who are not only professionals in the health-care setting, but also social agents in a wider contextual framework.

Exploring task-shifting practices in antiretroviral treatment facilities in the Free State Province, South Africa.

There is good progress with the implementation of South Africa's antiretroviral treatment program. The country, however, faces human resource shortages that could be addressed through appropriate task shifting. During 2009, we studied task shifting from nurses to community health workers (CHWs) for HIV treatment and care at 12 primary health-care clinics in Free State Province, South Africa. We found inefficiency in nurse deployment, and nurses spent considerable time on training, counseling, and administrative tasks that could be shifted to CHWs. Such a shift will require the South African Ministry of Health to recognize CHWs formally in the health system.