Nurses can fill in for scarce medics - studies

Mexico City: HIV patients under the care and management of trained nurses fared just as well as patients treated by doctors, if not better, according to two studies that demonstrate ways to replace scarce doctors in Africa.

Areas hard hit by the Aids virus often suffer a shortage of doctors and some of the discussion at an international Aids conference in Mexico City this week focused on how this could be partially answered by "task-shifting," or transferring some of the responsibilities of doctors to nurses.

In both studies, nurses stepped adequately into the shoes of doctors when managing HIV patients being given drug treatment.

"It's a partial answer ... but this is a way of helping, particularly in settings where prevalence is so high," Ciaran Humphreys, a public health consultant with the Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development in Britain, said in an interview.

The Aids virus infects 33 million people globally, two-thirds of them in Africa, according to the UNAIDS.

Cocktails of HIV drugs can keep patients alive, healthy and working.

Researchers in both studies agreed that questions needed to be answered, such as whether nurses were happy with the extra workload and if they needed to pass off their own work to other hospital staff.