Skip to main content
STI & HIV 2023 World Congress Main banner
Final Program


Icon Legend
Back

Policy & Community Engagement

Category: Syphilis: pregnancy issues

(P438) Scale up of syphilis screening and treatment among pregnant women in Zimbabwe, 2021-2022

Wednesday, July 26, 2023
16:00 – 18:00 CST
Project

The Zimbabwe Ministry of Health and Child Care (MOHCC) provides routine syphilis screening to pregnant women during antenatal care (ANC). To eliminate congenital syphilis, MOHCC adopted the World Health Organization (WHO) target to screen at least 95% of pregnant women for syphilis at their first ANC booking and treat 95% of identified cases. Zimbabwe is closing the gap in syphilis screening and treatment across the 10 provinces through scale up of the HIV/Syphilis Duo test kit and strengthening linkage of positive mothers to treatment. A key determinant for adoption of the HIV/Syphillis duo kit was the development of national guidelines through broad-based stakeholder engagement that included nurses and laboratory personnel, understanding major bottlenecks to clients seeking STI care. This also included sensitization meetings with stakeholders and service providers, development of standard operating procedures and training of testers on the kit. Quantification to forecast kit requirements across the country was done, with an efficient supply chain system to prevent stockouts in ANC.



Issue

The objective was to determine the improvement in screening and treatment rates among pregnant women after scaling up of HIV/syphilis duo kits in 2022. The quantitative programme evaluation used routine programme data on syphilis screening and treatment for the periods 2021 and 2022. Data were downloaded from DHIS2, cleaned, and analysed descriptively using Microsoft Excel. Data from October to December 2022 were excluded from the analysis as it was not readily available on DHIS2.



Results

At national level, Syphilis screening rates at first ANC booking increased by 7%. At provincial level, provinces with 95% and above screening rates increased from 1 in 2021 to 4 in 2022. Treatment rates were comparable at national and provincial level, with 7 provinces reporting treatment rates of 95% and above for both years. National Syphilis screening and treatment data are shown in Table 1.



Lessons learned:

The findings show that scale up of the HIV/Syphillis duo kit contributed to increased screening rates in 2022 but were still below the 95% target. Concerted efforts are required to close the screening gaps and sustain high treatment rates in ANC in the drive to eliminate vertical transmission of syphilis.