Quality Standards for HIV Care in Latin America and the Caribbean

Across the Region, gaps persist in timely HIV diagnosis, early linkage to care, retention in care, viral suppression, access to combination prevention, including PrEP, and the management of advanced HIV disease. These gaps are unevenly distributed and disproportionately affect people facing territorial, socioeconomic, institutional, stigma, or discrimination-related barriers. Many of these gaps can be identified and addressed through a structured, systematic, participatory, measurable, comparable, clinically relevant quality-of-care system oriented toward continuous improvement.

The región already has some tools for monitoring the HIV care cascade, services for key populations, and advanced HIV disease (WHO, 2026), as well as global monitoring goals established by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS, 2026). In addition, there are country-level experiences using instruments such as QualiAIDS in Brazil, which assesses the quality of outpatient HIV services whithin the Unified Health System (Ministry of Health from Brazil, 2024). Other international experiences include HIVQUAL in the United States and the GESIDA quality framework in Spain.

An integrated regional framework, supported by a set of standards and indicators, could enable objective and comparable measurement, provide a basis for targeted actions to strengthen the use of data to improve services, and facilitate regional learning through a person-centred model of comprehensive HIV care.
This webinar seeks to initiate dialogue between PAHO, national HIV programs mangers, and members of GCTH by presenting different reference framworks and gathering country-level expectations regarding framework , guidelines, and quality indicators for HIV care. 
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