NCT01459120

Comparison of Door-to-door Versus Community Gathering to Provide HIV Counseling and Testing Services in Rural Lesotho

Comparing Door-to-door Versus Community Gathering in Providing HIV Counseling and Testing Within an Integrated Primary Health Care Package: a Cluster Randomized Trial in Rural Lesotho

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 1,800 (estimated)
• Sponsor: SolidarMed · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: —
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The purpose of this trial is to determine if door-to-door is more effective than community gathering in providing voluntary HIV counseling and testing (VCT) in communities in rural Lesotho. The voluntary HIV counseling and testing will be proposed as an integrated part of a package of proposed services. The package consists of: Blood-pressure measurement, blood-glucose measurement, Body-mass-index (adults), weight for height (children), catch-up vaccinations, deworming (children) Vitamin A (children \& young women), family planning for eligible women, Tuberculosis screening and HIV counseling and testing.

Detailed description

12 health centers (clusters) in rural Lesotho are matched according to their routine performance in VCT and enrollment into chronic HIV/AIDS care (average numbers tested positive and enrolled into HIV/AIDS care per month per facility). After matching, 6 health centers are randomly assigned to perform door-to-door VCT, whereas the others perform the traditional community gathering approach (called "pitso" in Sesotho). Within the catchment area of each health center five campaigns in five different, randomly selected villages, are held (one day VCT campaign per village). Within each cluster another five villages are randomly selected who do not get a particular campaign and serve as a control for each cluster. In each matched cluster-pair, both health centers conduct the five campaigns during the same week (one conducting it as door-to-door, the other one conducting it through "pitsos" (community gathering)). Both approaches receive the same resources in terms of finances, time spending doing the VCT-campaign and human resources.

Conditions

• HIV/AIDS
• Tuberculosis
• Diabetes Mellitus
• Arterial Hypertension

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Door-to-door	Health workers propose the integrated service package including VCT at the peoples' homes (home-based testing).
OTHER	Pitso	Health care workers propose the integrated service package including VCT through community gatherings ("Pitso").

Timeline

• Start date: 2011-10-01
• Primary completion: 2012-02-01
• Completion: 2012-02-01
• First posted: 2011-10-25
• Last updated: 2012-02-09

Locations

2 sites across 1 country: Lesotho