At ViiV, our mission is simple: to leave no person living with HIV behind. On our journey to end the epidemic, we also focus on people who could benefit from PrEP. But we know we can’t do it alone. That’s why community engagement – involving the community in achieving long-term and sustainable healthcare outcomes - is key to how we work at ViiV.
Community Engagement is a long-term, dynamic process related to broad contextual factors influencing practice* and involving a wide group of stakeholders including people living with and affected by HIV, both individually and as groups. As prevention is key to breaking the cycle of HIV a major part of our approach focuses on education about, and access to, HIV prevention options.
*e.g. advocacy, education, research, programming, policy, service delivery and community-led monitoring
For over 40 years, cross-sector collaborative efforts by HIV stakeholders have resulted in incredible advances in tackling the epidemic. Pivotal to this has been the involvement and leadership of communities including people living with HIV. Their meaningful participation in clinical trials, policy decision-making, advocacy and education programmes and service delivery have been instrumental to the success of HIV innovation, shaping the prevention, treatment and care landscape and continued efforts to reduce stigma and discrimination.
But innovation only matters if we can get it into the hands of those who need it - and the number of people living with HIV continues to rise. We know we’ll only end the epidemic if HIV communities are meaningfully involved and their voice is integrated into every step of our treatment and prevention access strategies, starting during development all the way through to supply, use and monitoring.
Community engagement works hand-in-hand with our ‘Patient Engagement’ approach which aims to embed the voice of the patient in everything we do, from early research and pipeline discussions helping to develop treatment and prevention options that meet current needs and future expectations, to collaborating with external patient-focussed organisations to help shape the patient engagement landscape.
By working with communities and the stakeholders that represent them, ViiV’s community engagement approach aims to ensure that our research and interventions meet the needs of the diverse communities most affected by HIV. Ultimately, we want to enable everyone to be able to exercise personal choice when it comes to treatment, prevention and care options regardless of their income or where they live.
Our approach has three core objectives. We:
- Listen to understand and better meet the diverse needs of affected communities: actively creating and harnessing opportunities for dialogue around lived experiences as inputs to our access strategy. Opportunities include physical tours, virtual calls, events, webinars or conferences, and via existing community stakeholder engagement structures.
- Let communities lead: investing in existing relationships with community stakeholders and partners that can cascade to country and community levels. Where we see unmet need, we will also invest in new partnerships.
- Collaborate and co-create: working with community stakeholders to identify and develop tools and education programmes to increase awareness, access and adherence to current and future HIV treatment and prevention options.
The Good Participatory Practice Guidelines* are the backbone of our approach, demonstrating our commitment to open, meaningful and sustained dialogue with community stakeholders. We:
- embrace diverse perspectives based on lived reality and actively work to address power dynamics (e.g. race, gender, age, HIV status)
- acknowledge and respond to pre-existing challenges already raised by community stakeholders (e.g. affordability and pricing, availability for all populations especially those most marginalised and criminalised)
*Developed by UNAIDS/AVAC. Includes: respect, integrity, mutual understanding, transparency, accountability and community stakeholder autonomy
We have a long history of engaging community stakeholders on critical issues for people affected by HIV – for example:
- Global: trans community with GATE - partnering on the first working group on transmasculine people and HIV, resulting in a world-first advocacy brief about trans men’s involvement in the HIV response. This was shared with global organisations (e.g. WHO, UNAIDS etc) ministries of health and national/regional policymakers as well as via social media.
- Global: older adults (ages 50+) with REALIZE - supporting creation of the ‘SHOP’ (sexual health for older people) toolkit to increase capacity of community-based organisations to deliver evidence-based workshops and resources to tackle knowledge gaps around sexual health and HIV.
- EU: gay men, other men who have sex with men and transgender women with Barcelona Checkpoint - who are revising PrEP protocols, to reduce the number of times per year people need to visit the clinic and workload for the staff by increasing access to at home HIV/STI tests and the use of an app to tackle issues around prevention adherence.
- Africa: adolescents and young people with ICWEA and APHA - implementing ‘Womandla’ training programme in Uganda and South Africa for 20 young champions to increase capacity for HIV prevention advocacy – including bridging information gaps around sexual health and HIV prevention options - in local communities and on social media.
QUESTIONS AND MORE INFORMATION
- Contact Shaun Mellors, community stakeholder engagement director
- Find out more about ViiV - including our pricing and access strategy, Positive Action programme, innovation and how we won't stop until we end HIV - on our website.
NP-GBL-HVX-COCO-240050 November 2024
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