Piloting WILLOW in Ontario

1. David Seekings, PhD – Ontario HIV Treatment Network & REACH
Marvelous Muchenje – Women’s Health in Women’s Hands
Piloting WILLOW in Ontario

2. Overview
• The WILLOW intervention
• Our process
• Lesson Learned
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3. WILLOW
Women Involved in Life Learning from Other Women
Target Population: Heterosexual adult women living with
HIV, 18-50 years
Aim: Reduce HIV and STI transmission risk behaviours
Method: Series of 4 facilitated small group educational
sessions
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4. The process so far
• Systematic review – identified several effective
interventions
• Worked with WHIWH to select best fit to local context
• Follow up interviews with others experienced with
WILLOW
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5. Considerations for Choosing Interventions
• WHIWH received summaries of several effective
interventions from OHTN, reviewed them and selected
two (2)
1) WILLOW program by Wingood
• Aligns easily with our existing HIV program and could
easily be integrated
– We already run a monthly group for HIV-positive women
– We have smaller mental health groups
• WILLOW could fall under this structure
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6. Considerations for Choosing Interventions
2) HIV Prevention Intervention for Low-income African
American women by Dancy
• WHIWH received a 3 year funding from City of Toronto,
and we wanted to incorporate a program that has
already been found to be effective
• Intervention developed for African American women,
could fit in with our priority population
*** Plans in place to pilot test the intervention
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7. Training
• Worked with OHTN to support training for the
intervention
• OHTN offered the options for training, either go to US or
do it in Toronto
• Choice to do it in Toronto, so that we could build
capacity locally
• We invited partner agencies to recruit service providers
and peers affiliated with their organizations to
participate in the training
• A team of 16 facilitators received training
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8. Lessons Learned
• Intervention is too prescriptive
• Difficulties of separating roles of support and
information provision by facilitators
• It does not cover some of the issues that are relevant to
the Canadian context e.g. cultural issues not taken into
consideration, language specificity, migration related
issues, etc.
• Made assumptions about the skill level required for
facilitators
• Importance of a mental health therapist/counselor to
provide support on site
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9. Lessons Learned
• Can take time, even with proven intervention
– Additional capacity-building
• Importance of having good understanding of context and
capacities at the start
• Training on intervention delivery was not enough
– Additional capacity-building training
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10. Next steps
• Pilot the intervention
• Evaluate
• Adapt (as necessary)
• Scale up
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11. Thank you