Evaluating the effectiveness of the HIV adolescent package of care (APOC) training on viral load suppression in Kenya

To evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation of the adolescent package of care (APOC) training on adolescent viral suppression at Family AIDS Care & Education Services (FACES)-supported sites.

The effect of APOC training was evaluated based on viral load suppression (<1000 copies/mL) of 10-19-year-olds in 13 FACES-supported sites in six months before (January 2015-August 2016) and after (November 2015-March 2017) the APOC training for each site.

Patient-level data were abstracted from the FACES electronic medical records (OpenMRS) and the National AIDS and STI Control Programme viral load website. Information on adolescent clinic day implementation and utilization of an APOC checklist as a proxy for services provided at each site was collected. Generalized estimating equations with repeated measures clustered by patients were used for bivariate and multivariate modeling to assess factors associated with viral suppression.

In the pretraining period, 60% of adolescents received services at clinics offering adolescent clinic days compared to 95% in the post-training period. Among those tested, 65% were virally suppressed during the pretraining period compared to 72% during the post-training period (odds ratio [OR] = 1.31, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.12, 1.53, P < 0.01). In multivariable analysis, there was no statistically significant change in viral load suppression due to APOC training (adjusted OR [aOR] = 0.97, 95% CI: 0.72, 1.30, P = 0.84). However, at clinics offering adolescent-friendly clinic days, adolescents were nearly 2 times more likely to be virally suppressed than at facilities not offering these specialized clinic days (aOR = 1.86, 95% CI: 1.04, 3.32, P = 0.04).

This study suggests that adolescent clinic days greatly improve adolescent viral load suppression and should be considered for implementation across HIV programs.