HIV Intervention for Providers Study: A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Clinician-Delivered HIV Risk-Reduction Intervention for HIV-Positive People

"Clinician-delivered prevention interventions offer an opportunity to integrate risk-reduction counseling as a routine part of medical care," explain the study authors. A randomized, controlled trial, the HIV Intervention for Providers study, developed and tested a provider-based HIV prevention training intervention in four northern California HIV treatment clinics.

Providers were assigned to either the intervention or a control condition (usual care). Participants in the intervention arm received a four-hour training on assessing sexual risk behavior with HIV-positive patients and delivering risk-reduction-oriented messages to patients who reported risk behaviors with partners of unknown or HIV-negative status. Efficacy of the intervention versus control on transmission risk behavior was compared by enrolling 386 patients of the randomized providers.

Over six-month follow-up, patients of the intervention-assigned providers reported a relative increase in provider-patient discussion of safer sex (odds ratio [OR]=1.49; 95 percent confidence interval [CI]=1.06 to 2.09), assessment of sexual activity (OR=1.60; 95 percent CI=1.05 to 2.45) and a significant decline in the number of sex partners (OR=0.49; 95 percent CI=0.26-0.92).

"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," the investigators concluded.

The Friends of AIDS Foundation is dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for HIV positive individuals and empowering people to make healthy choices to prevent the spread of the HIV virus. To learn more about The Friends of AIDS Foundation, please visit: http://www.friendsofaids.org.


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