SANTIAGO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Photos of the Clinic

The Dominican Republic has the largest number of HIV positive people in the Caribbean region. A very resource poor country, there are few initiatives to provide all the necessary support to those infected with HIV and AIDS or to prevent and test for the disease. In the case where antiretrovirals (ARVs) are available, there are often infrastructural problems that prevent these drugs from getting where they need to be – difficulty in transportation and continuity of medical supplies– and though ARVs are mostly sponsored by the Dominican government, such necessary medical needs such as blood transfusions, multivitamins and antibiotics are not.

Hospital José María Cabral y Báez is the largest hospital in the city of Santiago in the Dominican Republic, and serves as a teaching center for Santiago's three medical schools and residency programs. The hospital is the main HIV-AIDS referral center and receives most patients from the Province of Cibao and Province of Puerto Plata.

The HIV clinic there, named CEDI (Clínica de Enfermedades de Inmunología), has just under 1,000 patients who they follow on a regular basis and about 200 people enrolled in the Dominican government's national treatment program. Some 800 HIV patients are not receiving the life-prolonging medications they need to survive. The clinic has no full-time staff other than a nurse, some volunteers and the head of the department of internal medicine who sees patients three days a week. Most of the services offered are outpatient and referral services, although patients have been admitted to the internal medicine floor of the hospital.