The project – which according to Rádio Nacional de Angola (RNA) will be financed by the Global Fund, which plans to make up to 900,000 dollars available for the initiative, for one year – aims to strengthen diagnostic capacity especially for malaria, tuberculosis, covid-19 and HIV.
According to the director of the health research institute, Joana Morais, sometimes there are ruptures in the reagents and it may be normal for users to arrive at a laboratory and there is no test available. However, the aim is to make sure that doesn't happen.
"We sometimes have some reagents out of stock and sometimes it is normal for a citizen or a user to arrive at a laboratory and not have an exam available. What is intended is that this does not happen, especially for the priority diseases that this project is focused on: HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and covid-19", she said, quoted by RNA.
"You will have this continuous access, in addition to the issue of reliability, making sure that diagnosis is the correct diagnosis and the quality of the laboratories, once the laboratories improve, the clinical and treatment part as well", she added.
Furthermore, the person in charge also made it known that an activity plan is being drawn up that will cover training for human resources.
"We are developing a plan of activities, training of human resources, support for the two focal laboratories in these two provinces, this we can talk about some equipment, some electrical issue, then we have the issue of implementing the management systems of the quality and we have the part of the integrated information systems and so we can have access to the diagnostic data that these provinces are developing", she said, quoted by RNA.
Joana Morais again referred to the lack of reagents, indicating that ruptures end up conditioning the sustainability of diagnoses.
"When we carry out the evaluation with regional laboratories, our results have never had results below 98 and 100 percent, so I can say that we are within the quality standards and that really our greatest challenge or our greatest difficulty is access to reagents in a timely manner for the sustainability of the diagnosis", she said.
"What we would like is not to have stock outages because that is what prevents us from routinely providing assistance mainly to issues of differentiated diagnosis", she added, quoted by RNA.
It should be noted that the country will receive 82 million dollars from the Global Fund to help tackle, between 2024 and 2027, diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. The announcement was made on Monday, December 5th, by Joshua Galjour, senior manager of the institution.
