Consolidated Guidelines

As shown in the list of the members of the Guideline Group (GG) as well as the list of other organizations consulted, the development of these guidelines has been a collaborative process involving not only all regions of the WHO, several WHO departments, the ILO, UNAIDS (The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV), IOM, Global Health Workforce Alliance (GHWA), Public Services International (PSI), International Council of Nurses (ICN) and other international organizations, but also involved people living with HIV and AIDS.

The Guideline Group aimed to gather evidence on the policies and legislation that exist in 34 countries, with 4 of 6 WHO regions responding prior to the drafting of the Synthesis report (Yassi et al., 2009). The purpose was to identify gaps in policy and barriers to implementing related policies related to improving healthcare worker access to HIV and TB services. Overall HIV and TB prevalence determined the number of countries to be surveyed for each region. Within each country, the WHO HIV officer liaised with their respective Ministry of Health to facilitate collection of data.

The Five Country Study by Corbett (2007a) provides high quality evidence relevant to developing guidelines. The methodology included interviews with 938 health workers from 50 facilities across five African countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe), 30 of which were selected through random cluster sampling, with the others selected through purposive selection seeking facilities with best practices.

The first step was to conduct a review of existing guidelines. This was especially important given that the purpose of these Guidelines is to provide guidance on how to accelerate the implementation of policies and programmes to deliver evidence-based measures and services related to HIV and TB to the health workforce. The identification of relevant guidelines was conducted by the consultant team reviewing lists of WHO and ILO guidelines in consultation with the Guideline Group.

It is now recognized that loss of health workers due to HIV and TB requires urgent attention (Ncayiyana 2004, Menzies 2007). Hitting hardest in countries that are already severely affected by the global health human resource crisis, this situation is negatively affecting the goal of universal access to HIV services (Schneider 2006). It has been identified that together HIV and TB account for an extremely high proportion of the mortality and morbidity experienced by health workers in high burden countries (Harries 2002, Tawfik 2003).

The population of interest in these guidelines is children and adolescents, defined as: