Discussion
HIV to engage in self-care behaviors, ’ HIV care and treatment practices [
Our findings highlight the critical role of self-worth, identity, and sense of community for young people living with HIV to engage in self-care behaviors. Extant data supports this finding for other age groups. For example, among adults living with HIV in Zambia who disengaged from HIV care, three-quarters re-engaged after repeated clinic outreach [Our findings strengthen and extend the limited evidence [The IDI highlighted another distinctive feature of the Project YES! intervention in its inclusion of peer-led individual and group counseling sessions, a combination which had great appeal among the youth interviewed. Group-level interventions for young people living with HIV have been praised for their ability to reach more adolescents using fewer resources than individual-level approaches [One topic which did not emerge as a theme concerned the involvement of caregivers in the Project YES! intervention. Some youth described benefits of having their caregivers included in the project, but nearly half did not have a caregiver attend the program. This is a limitation of the study given that caregiver involvement was not included as one of the sampling criteria. As a result, the findings on caregiver involvement did not reach saturation. The topic should be explored in future studies of Project YES! given that the family environment is recognized as playing a critical role in youths’ HIV care and treatment practices [