A study of outpatient healthcare use by ageing people with HIV

Acta Clinica Belgica
Michèle GeysLudwig Apers

Abstract

Antiretroviral treatment has turned HIV infection into a chronic condition with a near normal life expectancy and an ageing patient population. For a well-defined proportion of these patients, HIV-care could pass from specialty care to primary care, especially for prevention and treatment of additional chronic diseases. A better understanding of the complex health needs of this particular proportion is needed to determine the optimal way to integrate specialist and primary care. Our objective was to examine the health-seeking behaviour of ageing HIV patients. We investigated which physicians they consulted and the reasons for encounter. We also explored patients' participation in preventive healthcare activities. We conducted a retrospective descriptive cohort study among adults, 60 years of age or older living with HIV, who came for a routine consultation visit at the HIV clinic of the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) over a period of 9 months. Those who met the inclusion criteria were offered a self-administered questionnaire. The responses were manually coded, exported into Excel and subsequently imported into SPSS for descriptive statistical analysis. We analysed questionnaires from 74 patients, 11 women and 63 men. Sin...Continue Reading

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