Giving Compass' Take:

• Kayla Dawson details her experience working in Manipur with a team from Doctors Without Borders and how it adapted its care model to benefit the most patients. 

• Dawson explains that the team working on a project for HIV treatment shifted to a differentiated model of care that focuses on individualized health care plans for each patient. This helps the team stay efficient, streamline processes, and reduces barriers for patients in terms of access to care.  How are other professionals in the medical world adapting and shifting care models to provide the best outcomes for patients?

• Read more about the differentiated model of care approach to HIV treatment. 


The focus of this time period has been the need for psychosocial support to staff within our projects.

In Manipur, the team struggled with an unexpected tragic event. Meanwhile, in Kashmir, increased tensions in the area caused a great deal of distress for the team there who are running a mental health counselling project.

For me, this meant my role saw a bit of a shift from being a manager to providing psychological first aid to the Manipur and Kashmir teams themselves.

Psychological first aid (PFA) is an evidence-based approach for responding to traumatic events, with the aim to reduce initial distress and foster coping.

It suggests that individuals may be impacted by such events, causing a wide range of reactions (emotional, spiritual, behavioural, etc.) that can interfere with coping. However, it does not pathologise these reactions and instead suggests that a supportive and compassionate approach to addressing an individual’s psychosocial needs can assist in recovery.

There are big changes coming to the project as we are gearing up to implement a "differentiated model of care for HIV treatment." Wondering what this means?

Within the current model, patients attend the clinic at the same frequency and see all health care providers (counsellor, nurse, doctor) regardless of their health needs. This means long waiting times and high patient volumes in the clinic.

In the differentiated model, a patient-centred approach is taken in which individual treatment plans will be developed based on a patient’s care needs. For stable patients, this means fewer clinic visits - with two clinical consultations a year (one doctor visit and one nurse visit) and two ART (antiretroviral therapy) pharmacy visits.

These changes will significantly reduce the barriers patients face to accessing care - such as the financial burden of travel and loss of daily wages due to clinic visits.

Read the full article about shifting models to support needs of everyone by Kayla Dawson at Doctors without Borders.