Retention in care

This booklet provides information on living well with HIV as you get older.

Over the last three decades, a range of biomedical and behavioral approaches have dramatically reduced HIV incidence throughout the world and improved the quality and availability of life-saving treatment for those living with HIV.

A recently concluded randomized study in Tanzania found that short-term conditional cash and food transfers significantly improved HIV-infected patients’ possession of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and reduced patient loss to follow-up (LTFU).

The Accelerating Children’s HIV/AIDS Treatment (ACT) Initiative was a public-private partnership that expanded pediatric HIV services in nine sub-Saharan African countries from 2014-2016, providing treatment to more than 560,000 children living with HIV.

This year, 2018, will be the year that a really significant number of people in Africa started HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), the 22nd International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2018) in Amsterdam heard last week.

Background: The recent scale-up of prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) services has rapidly accelerated antiretroviral therapy (ART) uptake among pregnant and postpartum women in sub-Saharan Africa.

Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews of the literature examining factors associated with care entry, engagement and retention show that optimal lifelong engagement in HIV care can be threatened by a range of factors at the individual, social, and structural levels.

Caregivers mediate children's access to HIV care and their adherence to treatment. Support for caregivers may improve health outcomes in children, but fear of HIV stigma and discrimination can affect both uptake and delivery of support services.

BACKGROUND: In HIV treatment program, gaps in the "cascade of care" where patients are lost between diagnosis, laboratory evaluation, treatment initiation, and retention in HIV care, is a well-described challenge.

Outcomes of HIV-infected children have improved dramatically over the past decade, but are undermined by patient loss to follow-up (LTFU).