UMMS Affiliation

Department of Medicine, Division of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine; UMass Worcester Prevention Research Center

Publication Date

2015-09-30

Document Type

Article

Disciplines

Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms | Community Health and Preventive Medicine | Health Psychology | Health Services Research | Virus Diseases

Abstract

PURPOSE: To identify perceived barriers and facilitators for HAART adherence among people living with HIV/AIDS in Southern Puerto Rico using a Social Ecological framework.

PATIENTS AND METHODS: Individual in-depths interviews were conducted with 12 HIV patients with a history of HAART non-adherence. Interviews were audio-taped and transcribed. Content analysis was performed for each transcribed interview by three independent coders using a codebook. Using Atlas TI, super-codes and families were generated to facilitate the categorization tree as well as grounded analyses and density estimates.

RESULTS: Most participants reported a monthly income of $500 or less (n = 7), a high school education level (n = 7), being unemployed (n = 9) and being recipients of government health insurance (n = 11). Three out of six women reported living alone with their children and most men informed living with their parents or other relatives (n = 4). For the grounded analyses, the top four sub-categories linked to high number of quotations were mental health barriers (G = 32) followed by treatment regimen (G = 28), health system (G = 24) and interpersonal relations (G = 16). The top four sub-categories linked to high number of codes are treatment regimen (D = 4), health status perception (D = 3), interpersonal relations (D = 3) and health system (D = 3).

CONCLUSION: The results of this study suggest the interconnection of HIV treatment adherence barriers at various system levels. Future studies on HIV treatment barriers should explore these interactions and investigate the possible synergistic effect on non-adherent behavior.

Rights and Permissions

Copyright: 2015 Castro et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

DOI of Published Version

10.1371/journal.pone.0125582

Source

PLoS One. 2015 Sep 30;10(9):e0125582. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0125582. eCollection 2015. Link to article on publisher's site

Journal/Book/Conference Title

PloS one

Related Resources

Link to Article in PubMed

PubMed ID

26422049

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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