No person is denied admission to any of the services regardless of age, gender, race, national origin or religion. All are welcome. All services are provided free of charge.
Our main services include:
- 1. Pre-test counselling, testing and post-test counselling and CD4 tests (the strongest indicator of HIV progression)
HIV testing is offered to all who come to the clinic as well as all people seen during the outreach team’s daily excursions into inner city Durban and surroundings.
2. Comprehensive patient-centred primary health care
We aim to provide care especially to marginalized groups (refugees, homeless destitute, and drug addicts).
Specific activities include:
- Voluntary counselling and testing
- Integrated management of child, adolescent, adult and geriatric Illnesses
- Management of communicable diseases
- HIV/AIDS screening, CD4 monitoring and referral for ART initiation, management of opportunistic Infections
- Clinical diagnosis of TB, referral for treatment and then monitoring of treatment
- Management of Sexually Transmitted Infections
- Men’s Clinic one Saturday per month, providing men’s preventive and promotive healthcare
- Support and care of patients using ‘whoonga’ (heroin-based drug).
3. Advocacy and community mobilization.
Our overall aim is to encourage Durbanites to see the homeless, the refugees and the drug users not as problems to be solved but as fellow-citizens.
We have responded to frequent reports from homeless people of violence and abuse at the hands of police and security personnel, by initiating a dialogue between Durban Police management and representatives of the homeless community, to ensure that:
- Communities in inner city Durban are involved in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of their care and support activities.
- Inner city communities will no longer be voiceless and powerless e.g. during police raids possessions such as medical records, identification documents and medications can be confiscated or destroyed.
We continue to work with the homeless and with the Human Sciences Research Council to lobby for better policies and amenities within the inner city, such as a revamp of unoccupied city-centre buildings to provide accommodation together with a strong public works programme to provide employment for homeless and destitute people.
We are a voice of advocacy for the homeless. Ironically, this was even more true during the recent Global AIDS conference in Durban (July 2016) when in an attempt to ‘clean the streets’ for the conference, the Municipality put at risk the lives of homeless people in the city living with AIDS. As a result of community networking, this was covered extensively on TV news and on their website by ‘Al Jazeera’ in two separate reports:
Homeless people removed from Durban and
Homeless HIV patient removed for Durban Aids Summit
For more information about various aspects of the clinic, click on the following links: