Tuberculosis patients' perspectives on HIV counselling by lay counsellors vis-à-vis counselling rendered by nurses : an exploratory study in two districts of the Free State province, South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Due to the high rates of HIV / AIDS and TB, and the subsequent burden placed on the healthcare system that is further accompanied by severe shortages of nurses, the role of lay counsellors has become increasingly important in South Africa. This article reports about TB patients' perspectives on counselling rendered by lay counsellors vis-a-vis counselling rendered by nurses. \nStructured exit interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of 600 patients across 61 primary healthcare facilities in the Free State province. Data were subjected to both descriptive and inferential statistical analyses. Except for coverage of the 'window period' topic, patients' perspectives on HIV counselling by lay counsellors compared with nurses did not significantly differ in respect of duration of counselling, coverage of other HIV counselling topics and conduct of counsellors. However, 55.0% (n=126) of patients counselled by a lay counsellor would have preferred a nurse, while 42.9% (n=48) of those counselled by a nurse would have preferred a lay counsellor. \nThe findings suggest relative satisfaction with counselling provided by both types of counsellors. Expanded use of lay counsellors in TB / HIV programmes could help mitigate the human resource crisis that has resulted primarily from shortages of nurses. National TB and HIV / AIDS policies need to acknowledge and clarify the role of lay counsellors to facilitate their extended utilisation in TB / HIV services.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".