October 15, 2017 BY imani leave a comment
A pilot project has patients in several British Columbia cities getting $10 each for two HIV/AIDS related visits. Researchers with the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS recently started a study with 139 people from Prince George, Victoria, Surrey and Vancouver Canada, who have addiction health issues and may be at risk for HIV/AIDS.
“The goal is to get everybody that could be diagnosed with HIV aware of their status and get onto antiretroviral therapy, which is obviously life saving for them and also protects them from passing on the virus to loved ones or partners,” said research scientist Mark Hull.
Hull says they are using the incentive to target people who might not otherwise engage in the health-care system.
“The thing that we’ve realized is, that for a lot of people, they don’t know their HIV status, and this is what this project really is looking at,” said Hull.
“It’s taking some of the lessons that have been learned in economics and other fields of interventions and seeing what small nudges we can do to help encourage people to engage in care and look at their HIV status.”
As for concerns about paying people to get tested and treated, Hull says it’s worth the money.
“If we look at the cost of a day of being admitted to hospital or people getting sick and falling out of work or not being able to do their jobs, the cost loss there is huge,” said Hull.
“These very small numbers would be very effective at a health-care system level, if it’s shown to actually make a difference.”
The study is still in the data collection phase and is expected to complete all followup visits for the pilot by the end of March 2018.