HIV Self-Testing Clinical Trial Results Prove Feasibility in Application

Lynae Darbes, PhD, professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Clinical Sciences at the University of Michigan, spoke about how future strategies regarding HIV prevention can be influenced by the findings of her research on self-testing for HIV and providing counsel in couples.

Transcript

How can these findings inform future strategies for integrating couples-based HIV prevention into maternal and child health programs?

I believe we showed that our approach is feasible. We had a large sample. We had 800 couples, so I believe we showed that this home-based or home visits approach is feasible. We demonstrated the efficacy for couples testing and viral suppression, along with other important outcomes, including male testing and identifying these serodiscordant couples, which are a vulnerable population. I think that some of our future discussions are going to revolve around this cost consideration. We have some preliminary results with regard to cost effectiveness that are promising, meaning that although this intervention may be more expensive to implement with these home-based visits, there can still be cost savings overall given the type of results, such as when you improve viral suppression, when you identify people living with HIV earlier, ultimately those can be provide large cost savings. But we're also talking with our community partners and getting input from the community about if these home-based visits aren't possible or feasible for cost or other reasons, it might work to offer the services through community-based organizations or churches, because the lesson we've learned over the years is that clinic-based visits, especially for men, especially maternal health, are problematic. Men just avoid going to kind of what they perceive to be women's spaces, and antenatal care clinics can be perceived to be 1 of those spaces. I think wehave to be open-minded. And I think men want to be involved. And we have heard from men that they're very invested in the health of their partners, families, children, but we have to kind of meet them where they are. We may need to be creative in terms of where we offer some of these services outside of traditional clinic settings.