Measures of retention in HIV care: A study within a review

Authors

Nadia Rehman¹ , Michael Wu² , Cristian Garcia³ , Hussein El-Kechen¹ , Manika Bhandari¹ , Gohar Zakaryan⁴ , Babalwa Zani⁵ , Anisa Hajizadeh⁶ , Annie Wang¹ , Rita E. Morassut⁷ , Jessica J. Bartoszko¹ , Oluwatoni Makanjuola⁸ , Diya Jhuti⁹ , Vaibhav Arora⁹ , Aaron Jones¹ , Pascal Djiadeu¹ , Lawrence Mbuagbaw¹ , Andrew Kapoor⁹ , Alvin Leenus¹⁰

1. Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
2. Michael G. Degroote School of Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
3. Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Canada
4. Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
5. Public Health Research Unit, AB Consulting, Cape Town, South Africa
6. Nuffield department of primary care health sciences, Oxford, UK
7. Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Western University, London, ON. Canada
8. Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
9. Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
10. Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Conference / event

Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact (HEI) Research Day, March 2023 (Hamilton, Canada)

Poster summary

People living with HIV (PLHIV) need lifelong medical care. However, retention in HIV care is not measured uniformly, making it challenging to compare or pool the data. The objective of this study within a review (SWAR) is to describe the assortment of definitions used for retention in HIV care in randomized controlled trials (RCTs). We conducted a SWAR, drawing data from an overview of systematic reviews on interventions to improve the HIV care cascade. We identified RCTs of interventions to improve retention in care for PLHIV, including all age groups, and extracted the definitions used and their characteristics. We identified 50 trials that measured retention published between 2007 and 2021. and provided 59 definitions for retention in care. The definitions of retention in HIV care are highly heterogeneous. Here, we present the pros and cons of characteristics used to measure retention in HIV care.

Keywords

HIV care, Retention, Measures, Standard

Research areas

Medicine

References

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7. CASCADE (2021). Accessed 29 September, 2021. https://hivcarecascade.com/
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Funding

1. Ontario HIV Treatment Network (OHTN) (No. EFP-1096-Junior Inv)

Supplemental files

1. Published manuscript   Download

Additional information

Competing interests

No competing interests were disclosed.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and / or analyzed during the current study are available elsewhere (e.g., repository).
www.hivcarecascade.com

Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 Rehman et al. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.