Grant: Catalyst Grant: Partnering for Impact - Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research

People living with HIV (PLHIV) face barriers to staying engaged in care that go far beyond healthcare. Many encounter social and structural challenges such as poverty, unstable housing, stigma, and discrimination which affect their ability to access and remain in care. However, engagement in HIV care continues to be defined narrowly by biomedical measures such as clinic attendance. This project expands that definition to include clients' own understanding of engagement, disengagement, and re-engagement in care. It recognizes connections such as food programs, peer supports, and harm reduction services as meaningful pathways to care that reflect the realities of PLHIV. Placing intersectionality at its core, the project acknowledges that PLHIV experience multiple, overlapping barriers to care engagement and seeks to address how these intersecting factors influence engagement. Through a collaboration between Casey House, Canada's stand-alone HIV hospital, the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Health Equity and Community Wellbeing at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the University of Victoria, the team will co-produced quantitative and qualitative research to link practice-based data and lived experience. Together, these approaches will illuminate structural barriers and inform the co-design of strategies that promote equity in HIV care for community members. Working alongside PLHIV as co-researchers, the project will generate a client-defined understanding of engagement, disengagement, and re-engagement, develop practical recommendations for care delivery, and create inclusive tools for clients, care providers and communities. This Catalyst Grant will establish a sustainable hospital-research partnership that centres the voices of PLHIV and strengthens capacity for equity-oriented HIV care in Canada.