The Power of Knowing – Experiences of Youth and Caregivers with Paediatric HIV Disclosure.

Jive Africa was once again honoured to be working with Dr Lisa Butler from Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. We have produced an educational documentary and a training course to support caregivers through a process of disclosing to the children in their care.

We were awarded funding from the Boston Children’s Hospital’s Aerosmith Fund for HIV Care and Prevention to support the expansion of our educational film, The Power of Knowing to a fuller length documentary which we have developed for sharing with a global audience.

Paediatric HIV disclosure refers to the process of communicating to a child/children that he or she is infected with HIV.

While HIV care and treatment programs for children are expanding throughout sub-Saharan Africa, a growing challenge facing health providers and caregivers is disclosure of HIV serostatus to infected children. Disclosure is an integral part of accepting and living with the disease and in accessing and sustaining HIV medical care and treatment.

Dr Lisa Butler, in collaboration with Dr. Philippa Musoke (Makerere University-Johns Hopkins University Research Collaboration, Kampala, Uganda) and Dr. Rachel King (University of California San Francisco), is conducting a study to evaluate the effectiveness of a caregiver-and child-focused cognitive-behavioral intervention on improving rates of disclosure to children and to evaluate the short and longer term effects of disclosure and non-disclosure on children.