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PI

Team Members

*indicates student or postdoctoral fellow

with fieldstaff:

  • Anathi Qina
  • Nceba Phike
  • Esihle Nyalambisa
  • Boniswa Jwili
  • Eleanore Francis
  • Sandile Luke
  • Kholiswa Mphiti
  • Michelle Odendaal

SINAKO: Households in HIV care

Developing and testing an intervention to capitalise on the intermediate role of the household in community support for chronic HIV care.

Project period

01/01/2021 – 31/12/2022

Project Summary

Current research on support for people living with HIV has focused on community-level (community health workers – CHWs) and the individual (the patient), leaving out the family/household level to which the individual is closely connected, especially in the South African context. Working closely with colleagues at the University of Antwerp, this four-year project, begun in 2018, is investigating the potential mediating role of the household in chronic HIV care in South Africa.

The study is framed within the Individual-Household-Community model for comprehensive HIV research in high prevalence, resource-limited settings. It includes developing and testing – in a cluster randomised controlled trial (RCT) – a household intervention to stimulate HIV competence levels and create HIV competent households. The intention is that this optimises the impact of CHWs’ support on individual antiretroviral treatment (ART) outcomes. In addition, a qualitative study to assess the acceptability of the intervention is being undertaken.

As the RCT was halted in 2020 due to COVID-19, telephonic follow-up was conducted to collect both quantitative and qualitative data to explore the impacts of COVID-19, lockdown and the situation in 2020 on the HIV-positive respondents enrolled in the original study. Data are being analysed and will be published in late 2021, when we also hope to start the RCT component of the project again.

The project is being undertaken in collaboration with TB/HIV Care and the University of Antwerp (with joint supervision of participating PhD students).

Funder