Atlas Executive Vice President Jamie Hart, PhD, recently published an article in the Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care. The article, entitled, HIV Provider Experiences Engaging and Retaining Patients in HIV Care and Treatment: “A Soft Place to Fall” examines the experiences, barriers, and facilitators to engaging and retaining persons in HIV care from the perspective of HIV care providers. Co-authors include Atlas’ Clarke Erickson and Theresa Spitzer, along with colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Abt Associates.
Engaging and retaining persons with HIV in care and treatment is key to reducing new HIV infections in the United States, and the findings can help provide insight into how best to achieve this goal. The study presents qualitative data from 30 HIV care providers in three cities. The authors identified three facilitators to HIV care: providing a medical home, team-based care and strategies for engaging and retaining patients in HIV care, and a focus on provider–patient relationships. They also identified the two main barriers to care: facility-level policies and patient-level challenges.
Their findings suggest that providers embrace the medical home model for engaging patients but need support to identify aspects of the model that promote engagement in long-term HIV care, improve the quality of the provider–patient relationship, and address persistent logistical barriers, such as transportation.
For more information, review the abstract.