Activities by Lakshya Foundation

A workshop was conducted where women discussed their problems with other women like them. Participants of the workshop felt that they are not alone and there are several women in similar situations as theirs. During the workshop games were conducted which resulted in several light moments that made the participants happy, they were relaxed and made new friends.

Information was provided by trained Nutritionist on how to use basic household ingredients to create highly nutritional food items.

Clinical psychologist from Sassoon General Hospitals discussed about mental stress and how to relive it with simple mechanisms.

From 2015 to 2016 extensive training was conducted for outreach workers by Lakshya at four high HIV burden districts of Maharashtra. This training was to provide outreach workers with appropriate information and knowledge on HIV transmission from mother to child, why ART initiation is important for mothers, why baby should be immediately started on anti-HIV prophylaxis, why mothers should exclusively breastfeed their babies, how stigma to HIV, challenges to access health care services can be overcome, is provided in Marathi language. ORWs will also be given training on how to use tablets to collect data from HIV infected women about their medicines, child’s HIV testing and their Anti – HIV medicines and infant feeding. Outreach workers were also given empowerment training with yoga and meditation and motivational counselling technique so that they can appropriately engage with their patients.

Lakshya conducted a workshop for empowerment of HIV positive women.

This workshop was a residential workshop where 12 women participated and were given extensive life skill, capacity building training. Data collection tools and workshop material were developed by Lakshya. Workshop was conducted at Sai baba seva trust at Kanhe. Although 15 participants agreed to participate only 11 participants participated and 9 completed the training. The workshop focused on various aspects of life such as relationships, body, Sexuality, Money, Work, and Emotions. Workshop started with small group exercises, group discussion, body mapping and psychological therapies and ended with deriving personal goal for herself and ways to achieve it. These activities helped women to express their problems, concerns, emotions which otherwise are “silent”. This three-day residential workshop gave them the opportunity to be away from their routine work and just to think about them, open up share their problems with many women like them. There were many light moments that made participants happy, relax, laugh, spend some time with oneself, and make new friends among the group. These women have shown 100% retention, not missed any study visit and develop confidence. A study was written in collaboration with John Hopkins university between May 2011 and Dec 2012. Preparation for an implementation science study. Under the current DAC PMTCT guidelines, there are already challenges to the adherence to HIV services, Option B+ will require even longer periods of adherence. Therefore, it is important to identify implementation strategies to optimize the public health impact of the new PMTCT guidelines. The central hypothesis is that the intervention proposed will result in optimized program implementation for each of the four key PMTCT components. Hence this study in collaboration with MSACS, will address key barriers to the uptake of the new DAC PMTCT components. Through the optimized implementation of the four PMTCT components, we expect to see enhanced uptake and adherence to the four key components of the Option B+ PMTCT program by HIV+ pregnant and breastfeeding mothers and improved health outcomes for both the mothers and babies. The study will test the impacts of intervention in an effort to optimize implementation of the national PMTCT program. Our partnership with MSACS ensures that the design of our intervention and the results of this study will be locally relevant and inform the national program. This study was submitted for funding to CDC, Atlanta, US.

More than 3500 women were given information on HIV, difference between HIV and ADIS, mode of HIV transmission and HIV during pregnancy. Importance of HIV testing during pregnancy was discussed in detail. In addition to this, treatment strategies for HIV during pregnancy were discussed.