Patient retention in chronic HIV care is a major challenge following the rapid expansion of combination antiretroviral therapy cART in Ethiopia. Patients were randomly selected from ten health-care facilities, and their current status in HIV care was determined based on routinely available data in the medical records.
Patients lost to follow-up LTFU were traced by telephone. Kaplan-Meier technique was used to estimate survival probabilities of retention and Cox proportional hazards regression was performed to identify the predictors of attrition. However, measures to detect and enroll patients in HIV care as early as possible are still necessary. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: Due to ethical restrictions, data underlying the findings described in the manuscript can be made fully available only up on request. Interested researchers may contact Legese A. Mekuria to request the data using the following contact address: legesealex gmail. For the remaining authors none were declared.
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The advent of combination antiretroviral therapy cART has been accompanied by prolonged survival and improved quality of life among HIV infected persons worldwide, including resource-limited settings [ 1 — 5 ].
In addition, the number of new HIV infections is gradually decreasing as evidenced by a reduction in the national adult HIV incidence from 0.
