Point-of-care viral load testing to enhance primary care HIV services in South Africa (360G-Wellcome-216421_Z_19_Z)

There are more than 20 million people with HIV taking antiretrovirals (ARVs) globally. People who are taking ARVs are advised to have regular viral load blood tests to measure how much HIV is in their blood. However, in South Africa, HIV treatment is provided in primary care clinics which don’t have good access to laboratory viral load testing. This means that many people who are struggling to take their treatment, or who have drug resistant HIV, are not identified and given the support or change in treatment that they need. We want to evaluate a new ‘point-of-care’ viral load test to provide immediate support to people with high viral loads in a primary care clinic in South Africa. We will invite people with high HIV viral loads to join the study and randomly select half the people to have point of care viral load testing and immediate adherence counselling. After six months, we will see how many people improved their viral load results. We will interview healthcare workers and people with HIV and to see what it was like using the new test. If the point- of-care test works well, we will use our results to design a larger study.