Objectives
To help rural mission hospitals integrate activities related to Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV (PMTCT) into their regular work, using an initially intensive but ultimately sustainable model. The primary objective of ZVITAMBO is to provide technical and material support to about 20 rural mission hospitals for HIV care and prevention services for women and children.
 
The services provided include:
1. HIV counseling and testing for antenatal women and their husbands.
2. Infant feeding education and counselling for all couples (HIV positive, negative, and of unknown status).
3. Nevirapine prophylaxis for HIV positive women and their infants.
4. Cotrimoxazole prophylaxis for pregnant women with clinical AIDS and for babies born to HIV+ women.
5. Micronutrient supplementation, to be reviewed in light of on-going research findings.
6. Infant HIV testing (by PCR) at 6 months.
 
ZVITAMBO's philosophy
To embrace (1) Ownership - of the work by the hospital, (2) Partnership - between hospital and ZVITAMBO, (3) Integration - of PMTCT activities into regular hospital work, (4) Quality - of work, (5) Investment - by both partners, especially in energy and time at the outset, (6) Sustainability - such that if ZVITAMBO left, high quality PMTCT work would continue.
 
The field of PMTCT work is new and changing rapidly, both in terms of scientific advances and in the attempt to "scale up" services to full national coverage. ZVITAMBO intends to maintain a flexible approach to the development of partnerships in terms of their scope and their detailed content. The intention is to work with mission hospitals to incorporate into their regular services, effective high quality work aimed at mitigating the effects of the HIV epidemic. Information hosted on www.kubatana.net