Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital and PharmAccess Foundation have a multi-year collaboration on healthcare financing for primary care and specific conditions (e.g. HIV, tuberculosis, maternal and child health) for people living in informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya.
This article describes the effects of the recent COVID19 pandemic on the utilization of care within two programs running simultaneously at the Gertrude’s outreach clinic in the Githogoro area in Northern Nairobi. One program, known as Sunshine, provides additional HIV care (e.g. nutrition and complementary laboratory testing) over and above the government’s standard program. The other program, known as Afya, provides primary care.
The Sunshine and Afya programs provide us with an opportunity to understand, albeit at a relatively small scale, the effects that the pandemic had on healthcare consumption of a poor urban population and within the specific segment of HIV patients within that population.