ATTENDING POSITIVE  PREVENTION (PP) STAKEHOLDER’S MEETING.
I attended the said meeting above on behalf of the Director. The meeting was organized by MoHSW through NACP on Friday, June 5, 2009 at Peacock Hotel Millenium Towers – Kijitonyama.
PP is introduced as a means of promoting and enhancing HIV prevention among HIV-infected persons and their partners, family members and the community at large. The intervention comes from the fact that only HIV+ individuals can transmit HIV. This approach advocates for moving away from the Traditional focus of preventing acquisition among HIV – individuals, to having a significant impact by directing efforts toward individuals living with HIV who can transmit the Virus.
The workshop was conducted from 8.30am to 5.15pm. Participants were drawn from government officials working on HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment settings and officials from implementing partner agencies at national and field level.
The workshop had three main objectives:
• To describe current activities in Tanzania that promotes HIV prevention among/within HIV-infected persons.
• To discuss ways to augment existing activities to bolster prevention efforts, including through use of available Positive Prevention (PP) training materials
• To identify issues for next steps for the development of a national strategy for PP using intervention packages in clinical HIV care and treatment, as well as community settings.
The morning session was for presentations from various facilitators followed by plenary discussions.

In-depth group discussion focused in the following:
1. Clinical/Facility Settings and integration
2. Community settings and linkages of services
3. Policy, Guideline and Advocacy
I was in the third group and it was interesting and an educative discussion, hoping that something good will be prepared as a PP national strategy. The group agreed that the strategy will be telling exactly what will be added to the existing guidelines and policies, thus there will be no new guideline for PP (specifically) but mainstreamed properly in the existing ones.
Input from this workshop was expected to produce results and recommendations for integrating PP into HIV/AIDS programming in the country.