Leaving no one behind: Identifying approaches to improving HIV treatment outcomes among older Ugandans

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The number of people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is increasing, as people live longer due to increased access to treatment. Specifically the number of people living with HIV who are aged 50 years or older is predicted to increase from 3.1 million people in 2011 to 9.1 million in 2040. Facilitating older people's access to anti-retroviral therapy (ART) and enabling their ability to adhere to their treatment is key for their own health, and following a 'treatment as prevention' model it is also key to preventing the spread of HIV into the wider population.Older adults have been largely neglected by the prevention community, because the focus has been on reproductive health, mother-to-child transmission, and younger populations where known HIV incidence is high. There is also an ageist driven myth that older adults are not sexually active. Adults remain sexually active well into old age, with the cessation of sexual activity typically resulting from physical health problems and/or the unavailability of a sexual partner which is particularly the case among older women. Studies of HIV-positive older adults in the U.S. find they too remain sexually active, but upwards of 40% do not use condoms regularly; similar results are emerging from research in Africa. Access to ART can protect their own health and reduce their infectivity. Few studies have examined the barriers for older persons to access treatment for HIV, and to adhere to the treatment, and interventions to improve ART access and adherence have not specifically focused on older adults. This project in Uganda will contribute evidence to address a gap in knowledge on older persons' barriers to ART access and adherence in SSA.It is not clear whether barriers and facilitators to ART access and adherence would be the same for older populations as younger populations, or if social interventions that have worked well for other populations would sufficiently address older adults' needs. Older adults' barriers to other health care services in SSA include high rates of poverty limiting money for transport and care; multi-morbidity; ageism; and little understanding among health providers of older persons' needs. Their wellbeing is further implicated by social isolation and HIV-related stigma. This project will be the first to develop a tailored multi-pronged social intervention that identifies and addresses older Africans' barriers to ART access and adherence by addressing needs at the individual, community and health system levels.In this project, we will develop and refine a multi-pronged social intervention to improve access, adherence and wellbeing among older Ugandans. The specific aims of the project are to: (1) Use interviews with older adults, community leaders and health care workers to identify barriers and facilitators to older adults' ART access and adherence. (2a) Develop an intervention that will improve older adults' access and adherence to treatment based on community and older people's perspectives; (2b) Establish a theory of change, i.e., expected factors that will need to be evaluated for change along with the intervention to explain how the intervention works. (3) Refine the intervention by collecting potential clients', community members', and health care providers' perspectives on the intervention's potential, design and the ideal delivery method.This work will help design a future randomized trial which will formally evaluate how effective the intervention is in improving access and adherence to treatment, as well as reducing social isolation among older people living with HIV in Uganda.