Estimating coverage of a community-based home care programme

The Family AIDS Caring Trust (FACT) was formed in Mutare, Zimbabwe's third largest city, in 1987. FACT's home care programme started in 1992. The programme operates in the urban area of Mutare which contains three townships with a population of 131,367. The area employs a trained nurse as a coordinator and four assistants, each assigned a zone within the city, who carry out the bulk of the visits. As part of an evaluation of the programme we attempted to estimate its coverage using different models. Using these models the FACT programme has a coverage of between 2.5%-23%. It is important that all home care programmes think in terms of coverage and do not simply strive to provide high quality services to a few patients.