National Nutrition and HIV/AIDS Guidelines for Service Providers of ...

FOREWORD
Adequate nutrition is essential for achieving and preserving health for everyone. Food and
nutrition thus play important roles in care and mitigation of infections including, and
especially, HIV/AIDS.
In recognition of the centrality of adequate nutrition in the fight against HIV/AIDS, the
Department of Public Health has developed the National Nutrition and HIV/AIDS Guidelines for
Service Providers to People Living with HIV/AIDS. The purpose of these guidelines is to enable
service providers to provide high quality nutritional care and support. The guidelines define
what service providers can do to support PLWHA at various contact points and for different
target groups such as children, pregnant and lactating women, and for food-insecure
situations. These guidelines are wide in scope to cater for the different organizations that
currently provide care and support for PLWHA.
We therefore urge each stakeholders to adapt these guidelines to meet the specific needs of
their clients in order to ensure that PLWHA get the very best nutrition care and support. We
encourage you as service providers to use these guidelines to inform your standard of nutrition
care and support for PLWHA, to train new providers in the nutrition care and support of PLWHA
and to develop nutrition and HIV/AIDS guides for PLWHA and their families.
We trust that these guidelines contain information that will enable the users to actively engage
in advocacy, programming, information sharing and on-going research to contribute to the
fight against HIV/AIDS.
Mmatsae Balosang (Mrs)
Director, Department of Public Health