Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Women living with HIV have unique health care needs. One area in which HIV care differs between women and men is in family planning. With better HIV treatment available, more women living with HIV are becoming pregnant. Most of these pregnancies, however, are not planned. Women describe not receiving the counselling they need on whether, when and how to become pregnant while HIV positive. This study tackles a lack of knowledge about the reproductive counselling needs of women living with HIV in Canada. The aim is to determine whether women living with HIV have discussed their reproductive goals with a health care provider. The study will also determine whether women living with HIV currently have a health care provider with whom they feel comfortable discussing their reproductive goals. We used survey data from the Canadian HIV Women's Sexual and Reproductive Health Cohort Study, which follows 1,422 women living with HIV in Canada. Information was collected from 617 fertile women of reproductive age (16-45). Among these women, about half (48.1%) said they had discussed their reproductive goals with a health care provider since learning their HIV status. Of those who had never discussed their reproductive goals, 27.2% said that although they had not discussed them, they would feel comfortable doing so with their current health care provider and 15.8% said they discuss the topic with their health care provider at the follow-up study visit. The next steps in this study will be to determine if age, receiving HIV care from a family doctor, and other social factors are related to having these discussions and comfort doing so. Such information is important to forming strategies that support the family planning and sexual health priorities of women living with HIV.