Assessment of Effective Coverage of Voluntary Counseling and Testing Services in Major Health Facilities of Jimma Zone, South Ethiopia

BACKGROUND: Coverage assessment of Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) service is useful to measures the health system effort or performance of health service delivery function and to influence decisions. The objective of this study was to assess effective coverage level for Voluntary Counseling and testing services in major health facilities of Jimma Zone. METHODS: Health institution based cross-sectional quantitative and qualitative study on health facilities that provide voluntary Counseling and testing services. RESULTS: The over all HIV/AIDS service package indicators availability coverage were 45.5% across the zone. The over all coverage for target population were 1.3%. The primary health care centers served only 18% of total registered Voluntary Counseling and Testing service users. Out of total positive serostatus clients, only 5% received condom. The coverage for post result counseling was 98.7% for all tested clients. Seventy-four (1.3%) of clients who were tested for HIV did not returned to know their results. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrated that effective coverage of Voluntary Counseling and Testing service was very low based on the providers view and records available. Thus we recommended that the services has to be strengthened, supervised and monitored to have a better achievement and improving the coverage status in addition to scaling up the services in the Zone. KEYWORDS: Effective coverage, availability, utilization, quality, VCT services