Home-Based Care, the Missing Link in Caring of Patients Living with HIV/AIDS and Their Family Members: A Narrative Review

Abstract

Inconsistencies between the number of patients, qualified caregivers and lack of adequate services andresources in the healthcare systems for people living with HIV/AIDS have led to the idea of providinghealthcare services for this vulnerable population at home. This study aimed to review the evidencerelated to the Home-Based Care (HBC) programs in the context of HIV. Literature search was carriedout without publication date limit through English databases of Cochrane Library, PubMed, EBSCO,Scopus, Google Scholar, Science Direct, as well as Persian databases including Magiran and SID bythe end of July 2019. Out of 1312 studies retrieved from the search of databases, six guidelines and 50articles met the eligible criteria. The results showed that the overall purpose of HBC is to create hopethrough providing appropriate care to help the patients and their families to maintain their independenceand have the best possible quality of life. The potential benefits of HBC could be discussed in threemain categories: 1) patients, including patients’ satisfaction, quality of life, adherence to antiretroviraltherapy, preventing mother-to-child transmission, as well as biochemical, social and psychologicaloutcomes, 2) families, consisted of promotinon of family members’ participation, enhancement offamily members’ awareness and provision of voluntary counseling and testing, and 3) healthcaresystems, containing health care costs, workload at healthcare centers and time spent on services. Giventhe lessons learnt from the existing HBC programs, developing an alternative approach for providinghealthcare at home in the context of HIV seems necessary and could be an agenda for action in healthpolicy making in Iran.

Keywords

• acquired immunodeficiency syndrome
• healthcare systems
• home-based health care
• homecare services
• human immunodeficiency virus