Setting HIV treatment targets within countries and programs is an important and difficult process.  Treatment targets define goals for programs and staff, provide a metric by which progress and success can be measured, and help in planning resource needs and the speed of scale up.  The process of setting targets is both a science and an art.  Data, research and past performance must be melded with political considerations and on-the-ground understanding of the capacity for scale up.

CHAI’s Pediatric Team needed to help 35 country teams set targets that would inform the program funder and ministries of health of progress, and help country teams understand and improve their programs.  CSHOR was asked to develop a tool for pediatric treatment targets for 2010. 

We found that previous scale-up of pediatric treatment has been linear in most countries, and recognized that country teams possess a thorough understanding of how programs will expand and implement new policy.  Based on this, we developed an easy-to-use Excel-based tool for country programs to use to calculate monthly enrollment estimates, choosing one of four scale-up scenarios: linear, optimistic (a defined percent increase over the linear), pessimistic (a defined percent decrease below the linear), or completely user-defined.  The tool was used by more than 19 country teams in helping define their 2010 targets.

To request the use of this tool or find out more about pediatric target setting, please contact Elizabeth McCarthy.