Bibliographic Info
GuidelineUpdated recommendations on service delivery for the treatment and care of people living with HIV
Year of Publication2021
Issuing InstitutionWHO
Recommendation
Status
Updated
Recommended in favor
Strong
Certainty of evidence
Moderate
Task sharing of specimen collection and point-of-care testing with nonlaboratory personnel should be implemented when professional staffing capacity is limited
Notes and Remarks
- 1.Access to high-quality diagnostic testing should be continually expanded across HIV and other molecular testing needs, ideally combining laboratory-based and point-of-care technologies in an integrated laboratory network. Implementing a wide network of decentralized and taskshared specimen collection and/or point-of-care testing will require centralized support from national laboratories and programmes to ensure adequate training, mentorship, service and maintenance, (continuous) quality assurance and accurate data entry at the point of care. In addition, decentralizing specimen collection and task sharing will require expanding human resource capacity. Legal and regulatory issues and policies may require adjustments in some countries to support the decentralization and task sharing of especimen collection and testing with non-laboratory personnel.
- 2.Concurrently, scaling up and building human resource capacity, including strengthening laboratory personnel and capacity, will be critical to expanding diagnostic access. WHO has developed tools and guidelines for human resources for health and recommends an approach to systematically address the dynamics of the health workforce that includes assessing workload indicators among health-care providers.