Prevention for HIV-Positive Persons: An Intervention for HIV Care Providers

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Investigator: Carol Dawson-Rose, RN, PhD, FAAN
Sponsor: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Location(s): United States

Description

Clinician-delivered prevention interventions offer an opportunity to integrate risk-reduction counseling as a routine part of medical care. The HIV Intervention for Providers study, a randomized controlled trial, developed and tested a medical provider HIV prevention training intervention in 4 northern California HIV care clinics. Providers were assigned to either the intervention or control condition (usual care). The intervention arm received a 4-hour training on assessing sexual risk behavior with HIV-positive patients and delivering risk-reduction-oriented prevention messages to patients who reported risk behaviors with HIV-uninfected or unknown-status partners. To compare the efficacy of the intervention versus control on transmission risk behavior, 386 patients of the randomized providers were enrolled. Over six-months of follow-up, patients whose providers were assigned the intervention reported a relative increase in provider-patient discussions of safer sex, assessment of sexual activity, and a significant decrease in the number of sexual partners . These findings show that a brief intervention to train HIV providers to identify risk and provide a prevention message results in increased prevention conversations and significantly reduced the mean number of sexual partners reported by HIV-positive patients.