Influence of COVID-19 on HIV/AIDS Retention for People living with HIV
Influence of COVID-19 on HIV/AID Retention for People living with HIV
Abstract
Background: In the time of Covid-19, various strategies are initiated by the Ministry of Health to ensure that accessibility to health care services remains within reach and undisturbed. The developed strategies include: issues of retention implemented through ensuring that stable client receive multi month dispensation, fast track service, and optimize appointment system. Despite the implementation of these strategies tailored to the improvement of patient retention, many patients at Kanyama level one hospital miss clinical appointments with late timings of drug pick-up. The factors behind late drug pick-up in the presence of COVID-19 were not clearly documented. We therefore set out to investigate the influence of COVID-19 on the timing of drug pick-up among HIV/AIDS patients at Kanyama level one hospital in Zambia. Methods and Materials: We carried out a Cross-sectional study at Kanyama level one hospital in Zambia using electronic records of 300 HIV patients were are on ART. Circular systematic sampling was used to select respondents from the list after an initial consented chat. Binary logistic regression was fitted on the data to determine the influence of COVID-19 and its interactions with background factors on late drug pick-up. Results: The presence of COVID-19 reduces the chances of picking-up the drugs latte. The interaction of the presence of COVID-19 and aging, (married or being single), having tertiary education and being female increases the chances of picking up the drugs late. Conclusion: If the complete viral suppression program goals are to be achieved, programs for the improving retention among HIV patients on ART should incorporate more sensitizations and encouragements to the affected subgroups and invest more in the community adherence group, and faith base community initiative (FBI) to maximize on community drug distribution as effective mode of DSD in the presence of COVID-19.All authors who submit their paper for publication will abide by following provisions of the copyright transfer: 1. The copyright of the paper rests with the authors. And they are transferring the copyright to publish the article and used the article for indexing and storing for public use with due reference to published matter in the name of concerned authors. 2. The authors reserve all proprietary rights such as patent rights and the right to use all or part of the article in future works of their own such as lectures, press releases, and reviews of textbooks. 3. In the case of republication of the whole, part, or parts thereof, in periodicals or reprint publications by a third party, written permission must be obtained from the Managing Editor of JPRM. 4. The authors declare that the material being presented by them in this paper is their original work, and does not contain or include material taken from other copyrighted sources. Wherever such material has been included, it has been clearly indented or/and identified by quotation marks and due and proper acknowledgements given by citing the source at appropriate places. 5. The paper, the final version of which they submit, is not substantially the same as any that they had already published elsewhere. 6. They declare that they have not sent the paper or any paper substantially the same as the submitted one, for publication anywhere else. 7. Furthermore, the author may only post his/her version provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication in this journal and a link is inserted wherever published. 8. All contents, Parts, written matters, publications are under copyright act taken by JPRM. 9. Published articles will be available for use by scholars and researchers. 10. IJPRM is not responsible in any type of claim on publication in our Journal. .