Publications by authors named "H M Whitehead"

Introduction: People living with HIV have high rates of hypertension. Integrated HIV and hypertension care with aligned multi-month dispensing of medications (MMD) could decrease the burden of care for individuals and health systems. We sought to describe hypertension control and evaluate its association with different durations of MMD among Malawian adults receiving integrated care with aligned dispensing of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and antihypertensive medication.

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Article Synopsis
  • Hypertension is a prevalent non-communicable disease in sub-Saharan Africa, yet there's limited knowledge about patient preferences regarding its care, prompting a study in Malawi.
  • A discrete choice experiment was conducted with 1003 adults, exploring preferences for care attributes like distance, waiting time, provider friendliness, group versus individual care, medication supply, and dispensing frequency.
  • Results indicated a strong preference for individual care over group visits, especially among people living with HIV, and favored less frequent medication dispensing, highlighting important considerations for improving hypertension care in Malawi.
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Fentanyl test strips (FTS) are lateral flow immunoassays that were originally designed and validated for detecting low concentrations of fentanyl in urine. Some FTS are now being marketed for the harm reduction purpose of testing street drugs for the presence of fentanyl. This manuscript provides a simple protocol to assess whether different brands and lots of fentanyl test strips perform adequately for use in drug checking.

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Concordance between physician orders for life-sustaining treatment (POLST) preferences and treatment at end-of-life is an important outcome measure of providing patient-centered care. We determine whether the COVID pandemic affected clinician ability to provide goal concordant care and replicate our previous report on care concordance and change in patient preferences over time with a larger sample size. We also investigate the quality of POLST completion to determine the number of documents completed with an advance care planning (ACP) conversation or a decision maker present.

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