Assessment of changes in pharmaceutical performance among primary health care health facilities that received technical assistance in a rural district of the Eastern Cape, South Africa

Abstract

Twenty percent of the global population receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) reside in South Africa (UNAIDS, 2017). Demand within the public health system, already constrained by human resource scarcities and budgetary and infrastructural challenges, is expected to increase given the estimate that only 56% of an estimated 7.1 million HIV positive people in South Africa are currently on ART (UNAIDS, 2017). Technical assistance (TA) interventions are deployed to support in-house government services to optimise services, however, rigorous studies to evaluate the impact of TA strategies are scarce.