Instead of having to go to the clinic every month, whether to get a new prescription or a packet of pills, patients can get medicine for two or three months at a time from a fast-lane counter at the clinic or pick it up from an alternative collection point like a private pharmacy or a community centre close to where they live or work.
Travelling long distances to a clinic and waiting in a slow queue discourages people from collecting their medication, research shows — with bad consequences for a patient’s health.
For example, if someone with HIV doesn’t stick to taking their ARVs, the virus can start replicating in their body again, which weakens their immune system, makes them prone to other infections and allows the virus to spread through unprotected sex.
In contrast, if someone consistently takes their anti-HIV medication, the amount of virus in their body becomes so little that they can’t infect someone else through unprotected sex. This is called being virally suppressed, which is the third goal in a cascading series of targets set by the Joint UN Programme on HIV and Aids (UNAids) — commonly known as the 95-95-95 targets — to end Aids as a public health threat by 2030.
In 2023 close to 1-million of the almost 5.9-million people on antiretroviral treatment in South Africa stopped taking their medicine. That same year, almost 150,000 people were newly infected with HIV in the country.
“Just because people are poor, it doesn’t mean that their time is less valuable,” says Hutiri. “We need solutions that focus on people’s humanity.”
Closer to home
Although the Dablapmeds system is a way to make medicine collection easier for patients and so get more people to stay on treatment, a fifth of the 25,000 medicine parcels in the Chris Hani district in the Eastern Cape went uncollected in March this year.
In 2023 almost half of 1,387 people in the province said they’d like to collect their parcels closer to home in a survey by the community-based monitoring organisation Ritshidze.
But according to the provincial health department, there are only 12 external pick-up points in the entire Chris Hani district, serving only 8,254 patients — a sixth of the active patients registered on Dablapmeds here.