Dear John Mdluli,
I love your point about how participation in the FACTS 001 trial gave your site the opportunity to engage with communities/individuals at high risk for HIV that were, per eligibility criteria, recruited for that particular trial. While this used to be true for us at Bridge HIV when we were one of the study sites that participated in efficacy PrEP trials in previous years, things have shifted now.
As such, one of the challenges that our community programs team at Bridge HIV has experienced lately is that all of our currently active studies are Phase I or II trials (for vaccines, experimental microbicides, etc.) that are looking to enroll participants at low risk for HIV, while most of our community partners are organizations that serve and are run by communities at higher risk for HIV or who have already seroconverted. This has created an interesting divide between our recruitment efforts and our community education and engagement efforts, and requires new strategizing on our parts on an ongoing basis for how to balance both efforts.
