Facilitating engagement with PrEP and other HIV prevention technologies through practice-based combination prevention

Introduction: Recent years have witnessed a rapid expansion of efficacious biomedical HIV prevention technologies. Promising as they may be, they are largely delivered through standard, clinic-based models, often in isolation from structural and behavioural interventions. This contributes to varied, and often poor, uptake and adherence. There is a critical need to develop analytical tools that can advance our understandings and responses to the combination of interventions that affect engagement with HIV prevention technologies. This commentary makes a call for practice-based combination HIV prevention analysis and action, and presents a tool to facilitate this challenging but crucial endeavour. Discussion: Models and frameworks for combination HIV prevention already exist, but the process of identifying precisely what multi-level factors that need to be considered as part of a combination of HIV interventions for particular populations and settings is unclear. Drawing on contemporary social practice theory, this paper develops a table of questioning to help interrogate the chain and combination of multi-level factors that shape engagement with HIV prevention technologies. The tool also supports an examination of other shared social practices, which at different levels, and in different ways, affect engagement with HIV prevention technologies. It facilitates an analysis of the range of factors and social practices that need to be synchronized in order to establish engagement with HIV prevention technologies as a possible and desirable thing to do. Such analysis can help uncover local hitherto un-identified issues and provide a platform for novel synergistic approaches for action that are not otherwise obvious. The tool is discussed in relation to PrEP among adolescent girls and young women in sub-Saharan Africa. Conclusions: By treating engagement with HIV prevention technologies as a social practice and site of analysis and public health action, HIV prevention service planners and evaluators can identify and respond to the combination of factors and social practices that interact to form the context that supports or prohibits engagement with HIV prevention technologies for particular populations.