The “3 Ps” of EmPowerment, Partnership and Protection – Stakeholder Perceptions of Beneficial Outcomes of Engagement in HIV Prevention Trials
by Abigail Wilkinson, Siyabonga Thabete, Jessica Salzwedel, Cathy SlackU.S-based non-profit AVAC, is offering a useful set of webinars and resources looking at how rapid COVID-19 research can benefit from the lessons learned in the fight against HIV - including the importance of applying good participatory practice guidelines to ensure research is effective and inclusive
The Good Participatory Practice (GPP) Online Training Course is a four-month, hands-on eLearning experience that brings the GPP Guidelines to life through interactive online content, case studies, work assignments and online discussions.
This tool, developed by the site staff of the Microbicide Development Program in Tanzania, can be used to help community, trial participants, or staff members, prioritize issues and concerns central to the trial. This tool can serve as a platform to generate a list of potential issues and provide direction for what or which issues should take priority at the research site.
Using this tool, participants can raise and explore issues they perceive as priorities in HIV prevention research; discovering links between them. An interactive and fun way for community members and participants to be involved with the planning of HIV prevention research at the site.
GPP Strengths and Gaps is a facilitator’s guide for an exercise that is designed to help evaluate GPP implementation at a site level. It can be used with community and trial participants to garner honest feedback and constructive suggestions for improvements.
The GPP Trial Site Binder is a companion tool to the Good Participatory Practice guidelines that research teams can use to help develop, organize and document the stakeholder engagement activity at the site. The binder is is divided into sixteen sections aligned with the guidelines. Each section contains key steps to help research staff follow the practices, templates for documenting and planning activities, and a place to file draft documents.
The GPP Blueprint is a companion to the Good Participatory Practice guidelines for biomedical HIV prevention research. It is a step-by-step guide designed for the research team members in charge of stakeholder engagement. It presents questions, worksheets and explanations that can guide and generate a stakeholder engagement plan for a specific trial or research program.
AVAC has developed a large set of supplementary tools to help research teams and other stakeholders understand, implement, and monitor the GPP guidelines. The GPP training tools can be used by anyone who wishes to conduct a training or to provide an overview of the GPP guidelines to a secondary audience.
Although these Good Participatory Practice (GPP) Guidelines were developed by AVAC and UNAIDS for HIV prevention trials, they are valuable to clinical trials across fields, research areas, geographies and populations.