HIV Communication Capacity Strengthening

Abstract

HIV communication is most effective and sustainable when it is designed and implemented locally and tailored to the local context. This requires capacity strengthening at national, subnational, and community levels. Through a review of the published and selected "grey" literature, we examine HIV communication capacity strengthening: definitions, measurements, implementation, and effects. We found limited documentation of HIV communication capacity needs or systematic approaches to address them. Most HIV communication capacity strengthening to date has focused on building individual competencies to design and manage social and behavior change communication programs through training courses, often coupled with networking opportunities for participants, post-training mentoring, and technical assistance. A few of these efforts have been evaluated through pre- and post-training tests and qualitative interviews with participants and have shown potential for improvement in individual skills and knowledge. Health communication capacity assessment tools that measure individual and organizational competencies exist, but they have most often been used to identify capacity building needs, not for evaluating capacity strengthening efforts. A new definition of capacity strengthening, grown out of recent efforts to improve effectiveness of international health and development programs, focuses on improving organizational and societal systems that support performance and individual competencies. We propose a holistic model for HIV communication capacity strengthening and call for rigorous documentation and evaluation to determine and scale-up optimal capacity building interventions for strengthening social and behavior change communication for HIV prevention, care, and treatment in developing countries.

How Can the Health System Retain Women in HIV Treatment for a Lifetime? A Discrete Choice Experiment in Ethiopia and Mozambique

“…The demand for better interpersonal quality of care may reflect that women experience brusque and disrespectful treatment by providers in resource-constrained health systems [40, 41]. The need for effective communication and more empathetic treatment has been amply demonstrated in HIV care although the evidence on what works to ensure respectful treatment by providers is sparser [42, 43]. Research on underlying causes of disrespectful treatment and on interventions that address this is urgently needed.…”

The Impact of Family Intactness on Family Functioning, Parental Control, and Parent–Child Relational Qualities in a Chinese Context

“…First, because we used abridged versions of the parenting instruments, some subscales of the measurements used in this study merely contain two or three items. Although good internal consistency reliability was reported for each scale, psychometric properties, especially content and construct validities, of the abridged versions were likely to be poorer than those of the full versions, which were demonstrated to be good (42). Therefore, future studies that assess parenting processes should use the full version of the scales.…”

The Uses of Self and Space: Health Providers' Approaches to Engaging Patients into the HIV Care Continuum

“…Another salient finding is that providers require comfort and confidence in speaking about sexual health with patients, to engender trust and allow the patient to share sensitive information in a trusting environment. 4,[34][35][36][37] Studies have shown that the quality of the interpersonal relationship between providers and patients, specifically communication, significantly predicts the likelihood of patients engaging in preventative healthcare. 2,7,[36][37][38][39] This reality underscores the importance of exploring and obtaining insight into the strategies used by health providers to engage patients and clients into care, a need this study aims to address.…”