Tshepang Trust

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The Tshepang Trust is
(also known as Tshepang) is a Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) registered as a Trust under section 21 of the companies’ act and has Public Benefit Organisation (PBO) status.
In July 2002, during its national council, SAMA started questioning its role as a medical professional body in the fight against HIV and AIDS. At this assembly, a gap was identified in HIV and AIDS initiatives of the time. There was no treatment initiative for patients in need of treatment. It was through these discussions that Tshepang was conceptualised whose primary vision is to act as a grant seeking organisation that ensures that patients in need of treatment received treatment by providing them with ARVs and GPs trained in HIV clinical management as well as to promote reducing the spread of new HIV infections.
The Tshepang Trust was established by Dr._Kgosi_Letlape together with Nelson_Mandela, the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the South African Medical Association (SAMA) and was launched in December 2002. Since the implementation of the national treatment role out in April 2004, Tshepang’s role to embrace this great milestone has been to bring forth the much needed human resource support, its GPs. The aim of the Trust has been to demonstrate and develop the capacity of the private sector to provide the needed infrastructure to support comprehensive care delivery for people living with and exposed to HIV and AIDS.
This approach aligns the distribution of medical practitioners of whom approximately 70% are in the private sector to the distribution of patients where only 16% of the South African public has medical insurance, with a significant number of them not fully covered for access to ARVs for a full calendar year.
From a treatment access perspective, the focus is with the co-operation of the government, identify patients in need from public health sector facilities and utilise GPs to treat and care for them. From a prevention perspective the aim is to engage South Africans in taking ownership of their lives by actively protecting themselves and those they love from contracting HIV.
STOP HIV Campaign
The Tshepang Trust has embarked on a campaign that seeks to address the HIV/AIDS phenomenon. The campaign is called Stick To One Partner. Underpinning this campaign is a broader Information, Education and Communication (IEC) Strategy known as e = mc , (an analogy taken from Albert Einstein theory on relativity) that focuses on empowerment of women, male reaffirmation in order to accelerate efforts on reducing further spread of HIV infections in line with the South African National Strategic Plan (NSP) on HIV and AIDS to prevent HIV transmissions by 50% in 2011.
 
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