Social constraints to TB/HIV healthcare: Accounts from coinfected patients in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a growing imperative to improve the coordination and collaboration of tuberculosis (TB) and HIV healthcare services in response to escalating rates of TB/HIV coinfection. Patient-specific challenges associated with the delivery of TB/HIV care have been minimally explored in this regard. As part of a larger study conducted in South Africa, this article highlights coinfected patients' experiences with TB and HIV healthcare in light of their broader social environments. Qualitative, in-depth interviews were conducted with 40 adult, coinfected patients (24 women and 16 men) and eight key-informant healthcare workers at three urban/peri-urban, ambulatory, public health clinics in the high-burden province of KwaZulu-Natal. Transcribed interviews were analyzed under a modified grounded theory approach to capture subjective meanings of healthcare experience subsequent to patients' codiagnosis with TB and HIV. Emerging analytic themes highlighted critical sociomedical constraints to TB/HIV care in relation to patients' income and employment, eligibility for social assistance and antiretroviral treatment, fears around illness disclosure, social and material support, and treatment adherence. Patients' healthcare experiences were bound by their poor access to essential resources, multiple life responsibilities, disparate gender roles, limits within the healthcare system, and the stigmatizing social symbolism of their illness. Overlapping social inequalities perpetuated coinfected patients' experiences with stigma and collectively mediated their health decisions around disclosure, adherence, and retention in medical care. The study urges a contextualized understanding of the social challenges associated with TB/HIV healthcare and helps inform more patient-sensitive and socially responsive interventions against the co-epidemic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".