MUHAS site improves retention through active tracking and participants’ engagement meetings

PrEPVacc’s MUHAS site in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, has implemented several strategies to enhance participants’ retention in the Registration Cohort.

Among them are weekly participants’ engagement meetings and the use of field peer sex-workers to trace participants who have missed a visit.

Nurse Tumaini Masawa educating participants on the concept and importance of vaccines

Since April 2019, a total of 24 participants’ engagement and re-engagement meetings have been held with all cohort participants to improve understanding of the study and to stress to participants the importance of timely study visit attendance.

Field team tracing missing participants

Field teams have successfully been able to trace participants who missed their visit and with this update their contact and location information that is held by the site.

Trends of participants’ retention in the cohort at different study visits

Overall these strategies have enabled the site to improve participants’ retention from 65% at visit 2 (3 months after enrollment) to 93% at visit 6 (15 months after cohort enrollment).

Prof Said Aboud, site Principal Investigator, explaining to participants the small amount of blood that will be drawn for various Laboratory blood sample tests