Nationwide Scale-up of the HAC Model

“This collaboration with the Ugandan Ministry of Health and the Africa Resource Center (ARC) could impact the lives of over one million people in remote communities over the next three to five years! This is what we have been dreaming of since we started in 2014.” Kevin Gibbons, Executive Director and Co-founder of Health Access Connect (HAC) commented.

People must have access to healthcare. The stakes are high. A study taken in 2018 showed that an estimated 1.4 million people are living with HIV, and an estimated 23,000 Ugandans died of AIDS-related illnesses. Furthermore, as of 2018, around 27% of adults living with HIV and 33% of children living with HIV were still not on treatment. Persistent disparities remain around who is accessing treatment.

In 2014, Kevin Gibbons and Carolyne Ariokot, co-founders of HAC, witnessed these disparities in the fishing villages on the shores of Lake Victoria. People living in remote areas had and still have difficulty accessing life-sustaining health services, such as HIV prevention, antiretroviral treatment, maternal health, vaccinations, and other services mainly due to the long distances and transport costs required to reach the nearest health facility.

 “We identified a simple problem: people living with HIV in these remote villages were dying because of their failure to access antiretroviral treatment. I had the opportunity to interview people in those villages, and I remember them pointing out the homes of their neighbours who passed away because of the failure to access these health services,” said Kevin Gibbons. 

 Peter (not real name), a fisherman from Lwabalega, a fishing village on Lake Victoria, also confirmed how difficult the access to antiretroviral treatment was. He said, “It was bad. Here at Lwabalega, we had difficulty getting healthcare and medications because of lack of money for transport. When I got infected, I thought that I was going to die! People were hiding their HIV status to avoid stigma.” 

It is for this reason that the initial need for Health Access Connect came about. HAC came up with a service delivery model called “Medicycles”  that simply involves organizing remote communities to set up a way to bring government healthcare workers to deliver health services to their communities. Over the years, Medicycles has helped to expand sustainable access to life-sustaining health services in remote areas.

This year,  Health Access Connect has been given an opportunity to expand the Medicycles community-led outreach clinic model by incorporating it into the national health guidelines and teaching other organizations how to organize communities to make outreach clinics possible. The program is targeting patients all over Uganda living in communities that are greater than 5km from the nearest health facility. HAC, in partnership with the Ugandan Ministry of Health and Africa Resource Centre, has already begun, and this collaboration could lead to over one million people in remote areas all over Uganda accessing health services near their homes in the next 3-5 years. 

“Through our Medicycles program, we have so far offered HIV testing and counseling to 4,878 patients of whom 107 tested HIV positive and 117 were linked to regular antiretroviral treatment. We are currently teaching different organizations how to implement the Medicycles outreach clinics,” says Bridget Nanyonjo, HAC Monitoring and Evaluation Officer.

Today, like the other patients living with HIV in remote communities, hope and gratitude are filled in Peter’s words of expression towards what HAC has done in his community. He says,  “Now, those who were hiding their HIV status are experiencing reduced stigma, and take their drugs. When they see others getting tested, talking with health workers and taking ART drugs, they also feel less fear and do the same. The doctor told me that when you take your tablets you can even live 50 more years if you follow the instructions of the health workers. That gives people the future.”

Another Medicycles beneficiary says, “We thank Health Access Connect for helping us a lot. We pray for HAC to stay long in service to this village. Thank you very much.”