Additional recommendations included: focusing more on content and on counselling chronic and palliative patients, dividing acute and urgent home visits, and analysing contents of home visits after a hospital stay.
While pharmacological support has been detailed, and effectiveness ranked, the content of behavioural counselling varies between interventions, and it is not clear what the most effective components are.
Questionnaires comprised patient characteristics, psychological measures (personal perceived control (PPC), state and trait anxiety inventory (STAI)), and satisfaction with counsellors, counselling content and design.
The ranges in the length of time for counselling sessions, whether for group or individual counselling, suggested that despite FANC and PMTCT guidelines, substantial variability existed in counselling content.
There was also disagreement on the content of counselling.
Data regarding the presence and content of counselling during dispensing are reported in Table 2.
Our findings affirm that the content of counselling during ANC is important.
The first author performed the interviews using an inquiry guide with questions about the counsellors' background, the nature and content of counselling, and how confidentiality and partner notification issues were handled.
Still, the diversity of fetal conditions which currently can be evaluated through ultrasound increases the demands on both the ultrasound operators and other antenatal health care professionals as the information and the content in counselling become more complex [ 42].
The survey asked about contents of counselling at both the pre-HIV test and the post-HIV test stage, as specified by the National Guidelines. Figure 1 shows the percentage of clients in each sector who reported specific HIV risk-reduction methods discussed with the counsellor during pre- or post-HIV test.
