Bridging the gap: an intervention to capitalize on the intermediate role of the households in community support for HIV care.

The HIV epidemic is putting a massive burden on South Africa's health system. Given the shortage of human resources for health, community health worker (CHW) support is cited as an integral part of a sustainable antiretroviral treatment (ART) strategy. Evidence supports the potential of CHW involvement but demonstrates large variability in its effective-ness. Work by this research team demonstrated that this variability can be largely explained by the household context – CHW support stimulates ART success in HIV competent households but does not work in less competent households. This proposal aims to build on this knowledge by developing and testing – in a cluster randomized controlled trial – a household intervention to (1) stimulate HIV competence levels and create HIV competent households, and thus (2) opti-mize the impact of CHW support on individual ART outcomes. With the activities outlined, the TEAM project will (1) build new knowledge and skills at the South partner in order to (2) develop an evidence-based, feasible and sustainable strat-egy to optimize the outcomes in vulnerable contexts where this knowledge is needed most.

Keywords:SOCIOLOGY OF HEALTH, PUBLIC HEALTH, SOCIOLOGY OF THE FAMILY

Disciplines:Public health care, Public health sciences, Public health services, Social work, Other sociology and anthropology

Project type:Collaboration project