MORE than 23,000 men have in the first quarter of this year accessed HIV and other integrated health services at various Men’s Clinics set up by the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ) and the Lusaka Provincial Health Office (LPHO) in the province.

CIDRZ Coordinator for Men’s Clinic Initiative Dr James Zulu said the statistics recorded was an improvement in the number of men accessing health services from 12,634 between October 2019 to January 2020 to 23, 595 in the same period of October 2020 and January 2021.

With financial support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this has created a positive outcome. CIDRZ and LPHO had scaled up the men’s clinic in Lusaka urban, Chongwe, Chilanga and Kafue, bringing the total number of Men’s Clinics to 25 from the initial 7 in all the 4 supported districts in Lusaka Province as at 30^th March, 2021.

The organization had also supported Ministry of Health (MoH) through LPHO to establish and operationalise 33 community posts which also targeted men in high volume sites like markets and bus stops.

Dr Zulu said the initiative had enabled men to access integrated health services in an interactive manner and improved their health seeking behaviour through provision of safe spaces for men to interact with peers focusing on sexual reproductive health and HIV related matters.

“The numbers of men accessing services is increasing and slowly men are becoming open when they find that the service providers are fellow men. We also hope that numbers could be maintained higher with 25 clinics now which has brought on board Chilanga, Kafue and Chongwe sub districts” Dr Zulu said.

Further, he said from the data available it was possible that the increase in HIV positive yield would have been influenced by men who previously never visited the general health facility who are now sharing their experiences at the new men’s clinics with their colleagues.

In order to make the men’s clinics more attractive to men, CIDRZ through LPHO has been building the capacity of the clinical providers in training them in the men’s specific problems like erectile dysfunction, benign prostate enlargement, prostate cancer screening, non- communicable diseases like hypertension, diabetes among others to be used as an entry point to reach out to men.

Male providers were recruited and sensitized to provide services from dedicated male specific consultation rooms within the out-patients department for both facilities where there is no stand-alone Men’s Clinics and where the stand-alone clinics have been put up like at Chongwe Hospital, Matero Main, Ngwerere and Chilenje Hospital.

Dr Zulu added that, even though men were less likely to utilize existing health facility-based services like HIV services, they account for a significant proportion of new HIV infections and subsequent onward transmission.

He has further emphasized that the provision of male friendly services remains an important step in trying to reach out to more men and break the HIV transmission cycle.