Community

Our research contributed towards improving health care for HIV and TB patients in South Africa by researching various factors which contributes to the effective and efficient care and delivery of care to patients in the public health care sector. We have been involved with developing clinic improvement plans within numerous KZN facilities both in the urban and rural settings. We also develop materials and SOPs for:
- Viral Load Monitoring
- High Viral Load management
- Data management and file hygiene

We are the conference secretariat and present seminars at AWACC (Annual Workshop in Advanced Clinical Care – AIDS & TB. AWACC is an annual conference providing updates in clinical management and public health programmes for HIV and TB. It includes presentations from local and international experts. It is attend by over 500 delegates from various countries and health care worker from both the private and public sector in South Africa. We have a strong presence (over 80%) from doctors, nurses, hospital management and other health care worker from the South African department of health.

In addition to the impact we have to patients, healthcare systems and society through our research and various training activities, we are also significantly engaged in numerous community projects where we give freely of our time, expertise and resources.
A few are listed below.

TB heroes’ project - We partnered with The Sentinel Project, The Health Ninja, and Umduduzi to celebrate the treatment supporters for children living with TB. We conduced workshops to train and inform the supporters of advances in TB management.

- Self-defense workshop for women – We partnered with an organization we sponsor, IFFSKSA (International Federation of Funakoshi Shotokan South Africa) and Virgin Active to provide a free self-defense workshop for women.

- Annual children’s Christmas party – we choose a children’s home each year, where we host a Christmas party with gifts, meals, entertainment and fun activities.
- KZN Kids with kidney disease Christmas party – we have been fortunate to help plan and participate in the Christmas party for children afflicted with kidney disease.

Our commitment to community is further emphasised through the various Adrenergy funded training programmes and internships we provide free of charge to learners. Our medical research training programme is a year long training which we have conducted over the last 4 years. The programme trains on average 15 graduate students per year. The intention is to develop and promote research culture amongst young individuals who intend to pursue a career in medical research. We train and equip individuals with the correct research practices to increase their chances of employment within our organization, partner organizations and other research bodies and to facilitate community outreach by giving back to our local communities in aid of developing the next generation of local researchers. We go further by offering interns the opportunity to gain experience in research by allowing them to participate on existing research projects at Adrenergy. Research interns are mentored by academics and have the opportunity to interact with leaders in HIV and TB research from Harvard University, Emory University as well as several local leading universities, who all serve as members on our science advisory board.

We have engaged with numerous community, research public sector and non-governmental organisations and have partnered with many of them on a variety of projects. Our commitment to share our knowledge and resources find us actively seeking out opportunities to give back to the communities in which we work.

KZN has the largest population of HIV infected participants and the largest ARV programme in the world. By engaging and creating a network with US colleagues, we are able to attract international funding to provide employment to South African researchers, academics, student and healthcare workers on a variety of infectious diseases research studies. At the same time we are bringing in expertise to develop local capacity and skills. All this translates to the improvement in the healthcare of South African patients and providing a measure impact in the public healthcare system.

In short our organisation through both its business practice and social impact community projects has had immense community engagement and lead to society upliftment in many facets.