Treating HIV: supporting the needs of Libya’s health workers
To track and monitor the health status of people who are living with HIV/AIDS, WHO is giving Libya’s health care system the tools it needs. In June 2019, WHO Libya provided IT equipment, including servers and software, to the National Center for Disease Control and the Infectious Disease Department of Tripoli University Hospital.
“This equipment will help the staff, who have already been trained, to ensure the smooth flow of patient information,” says Dr Jaffar Hussein, WHO Representative in Libya. “The care given to people living with HIV needs to be monitored closely, and this equipment will make that possible.”
WHO provided life-saving antiretroviral medicines benefiting more than 400 patients in 2018, and 2 shipments of ARV medicines in 2017. WHO Libya has also updated the national HIV guidelines according to international standards and, at a WHO collaborating centre for HIV/AIDS in Tunis, trained one batch of Libyan physicians who prescribe ARVs.
Despite the ongoing armed conflict in Libya’s capital that began in spring 2019, WHO’s technical and logistic support of Libya’s Ministry of Health remains uninterrupted. WHO is working with the Ministry to implement a district health information system to track and monitor patients.
The hardware and software are funded by the European Commission under a project titled "Strengthening the Health Information System and Medicine Supply Chain" (SHAMS).
(Source: WHO)