Towards a knowledge management framework for assisting organisations to evaluate their own (non-clinical) approaches to the dissemination of knowledge about HIV/AIDS intervention programmes in South Africa

Abstract

Nearly 40 million people worldwide are living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS), with just 12% of those who urgently need treatment receiving it. South Africa (SA) has one of the highest cases of HIV infections in the world. Intervention efforts have not kept pace with the spread of HIV/AIDS, and a knowledge divide has been identified as a major factor in this. Within healthcare knowledge management has been applied to a number of areas. These include methods and systems that reduce daily routine work and calculation errors, methods and systems for evaluation of cost and quality scenarios, systems and infrastructure for the collaboration of health professionals, and systems and infrastructure that deal with patient management and patient care. The managerial issues of development and implementation using knowledge management have not been addressed in the literature in a way that results in a framework that can use knowledge management to help evaluate the intervention programmes in regard to the identified knowledge divide. This paper reports on progress to date on the development of a knowledge management evaluation framework that can assist in more successful management of HIV/AIDS intervention programmes in South Africa.