Focusing on Adherence
After a long and thorough search through a good number of stores in Mbabane, we finally found coffee stirrers in a small food catering supplier store here. We were quite excited and set off to work on developing liquid measuring cards, such that when you measure medication with the coffee stirrer dipstick, you can lay it on this card and read the amount of the liquid that is remaining in the bottle. It appears that we will have 5 such cards, because there are 5 different bottles that are used for Nevirapine and Kaletra. We spent most of last week developing the measurement cards and we ended up running into multiple challenges along the way. For one, acquiring enough Nevirapine and Kaletra for testing the dipstick is extremely difficult- the pharmacy is given a stock by the government and they must monitor the use of every bottle and the medicine is very expensive to purchase independently. However, it is very important that we use the actual medication because of the viscosity of the meds makes their measurement different from the measurement of water in the same container. We decided to ask the adherence expert clients save any returned liquid medication for us to experiment with; hopefully they can collect a good amount for us!
We also briefly met with ICAP to follow up on the pill adherence charts that the previous interns had worked on, and we found that there was some confusion about the charts resulting in the charts not being printed or used. Thus, we got in touch with the print shop ICAP had previously contacted and after a number of visits, were able to order 30 sets of charts to be printed to be used by 30 ICAP clinics immediately.
Other good news- our dosing clip study was approved by the Baylor-Swaziland IRB. We are now submitting the protocol to the Baylor IRB… just 2 more IRBs to go! We hope that we can get all the approvals by done by the end of June so that we can do the study before leaving.