Review PaperStrategies for delivery of HIV test results in population-based HIV seroprevalence surveys: a review of the evidence
Section snippets
Background
Population-based surveys such as the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are used to assess local and nationally representative health data including determining HIV prevalence in many developing countries. Such studies, however, rarely return HIV results to participants1 despite the recognized importance of making people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV) aware of their status. HIV Counselling and Testing (HTC) is the first step in getting PLHIV linked to treatment2, 3 and has been shown to reduce
Methods
This review was conducted as part of a review of the literature related to HBHTC during population-based surveys and other studies that have provided testing and delivery of results in the home published January 1984 through June 2013. In this paper we present results for studies which conducted HIV testing as part of a survey and excluding studies where providing HIV testing and counselling was the primary objective. The review protocol including search terms and combinations are detailed in
Results
We identified 2466 articles from the initial search. Of these, 2146 were excluded after the authors screened the titles and abstracts. We excluded another 51 after in-depth review of the abstract. We identified an additional 69 articles from manual searches and reviewed 67 DHS/AIS reports. We therefore reviewed 336 full text articles, 18 of which met inclusion criteria for the review. Our search criteria had no geographical restrictions; however, all of the articles that met inclusion criteria
Discussion
Previous reviews have found HBHTC generally to be acceptable, with greater associated benefits than risks for participants.7, 17 This review, which identified evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, supports these findings, and uniquely contributes to the literature by demonstrating that including HIV testing and delivery of results specifically within population-based surveys is acceptable and possible. In terms of increasing the number or proportion of individuals diagnosed and linked to care, the
Ethical approval
The manuscript reviewed published literature and publicly available reports and thus ethical approval for writing the manuscript was not required. The reviewed papers were from studies which each had ethics approval for their research.
Funding
This work was partially supported by USAID although the views expressed are exclusively those of the authors. Dr. Kiene was supported by a mentored research scientist career development award from the National Institutes of Mental Health (K01MH083536). K. Sileo
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These authors contributed equally to this work.