Sustaining success: a qualitative study of gay and bisexual men's experiences and perceptions of HIV self-testing in a randomized controlled trial
Zhang, Ye, Guy, Rebecca J., Smith, Kirsty S., Jamil, Muhammad S., Prestage, Garrett, Applegate, Tanya L., Conway, Damian P., Holt, Martin, Keen, Phillip, Bavinton, Benjamin, Mcnulty, Anna M., Batrouney, Colin, Russell, Darren, Vaughan, Matthew, Chen, Marcus, Fairley, Christopher K., Grulich, Andrew E., Kaldor, John M., and Callander, Denton (2021) Sustaining success: a qualitative study of gay and bisexual men's experiences and perceptions of HIV self-testing in a randomized controlled trial. BMC Public Health, 21. 2048.
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Abstract
Background HIV self-testing was proved as an effective tool for increasing testing frequency in gay and bisexual men at high risk of infection. Questions remain about understanding why HIVST encouraged testing and how such success can be translated to programmatic implementation.
Methods We conducted a qualitative investigation of how FORTH participants experienced and perceived HIVST. Stratified sampling was used to recruit gay and bisexual men participating in the FORTH HIVST intervention to take part in interviews, focusing on infrequent testers and those who had received inaccurate HIVST results.
Results Our analysis identified several prominent themes organized into two overarching domains from the 15 interviews: (i) aspects of HIVST contributing to HIV testing frequency, and (ii) sustaining HIVST into the future. Participants also believed that their use of HIVST in the future would depend on the test kit's reliability, particularly when compared with highly reliable clinic-based testing.
Conclusion HIVST increases the frequency of HIV testing among gay and bisexual men due, in part, to the practical, psychological, and social benefits it offers. To capitalize fully on these benefits, however, strategies to ensure the availability of highly reliable HIVST are required to sustain benefits beyond the confines of a structured research study.
| Item ID: | 72306 |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1471-2458 |
| Keywords: | HIV self-testing, Home HIV testing, Qualitative study, Gay and bisexual men, Sustainability, Australia |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s). 2021 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
| Funders: | National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) |
| Projects and Grants: | MHMRC 568971 |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Feb 2022 13:23 |
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