Strengthening the Blood Pressure Care and Treatment Cascade for Ugandans Living with HIV– Implementation Strategies to SAve Lives (PULESA-UGANDA)

The "Strengthening the Blood Pressure Care and Treatment Cascade for Ugandans Living with HIV– Implementation Strategies to SAve Lives" (PULESA-UGANDA) is a five-year project funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The project is an implementation science study implemented by a consortium comprising the Infectious Diseases Research Collaboration (Coordinator), Makerere University College of Health Sciences, the Uganda Heart Institute, Yale University, the University of Washington, Research Triangle International and the Uganda Ministry of Health.

The PULESA-UGANDA research project will be implemented in selected health facilities within Kampala and Wakiso districts in two phases. The first phase (initial two years) is a formative study whose overall objective is to assess patients’ and health care providers’ knowledge, attitudes, practices, and routines relating to hypertension and barriers and facilitators to implementation of HTN care in HIV clinical settings. The formative study's findings will be utilized to design an implementation strategy to improve uptake of integrated hypertension-HIV care.

The second phase will be a cluster-randomized trial of 16 HIV clinics in Kampala and Wakiso districts, whose overall objective is to determine the effectiveness and evaluate the implementation strategy's economic and financial sustainability for integrating hypertension and HIV care that will have been developed in the formative phase. During this phase, health facilities will be assigned to receive free and consistent access to blood pressure diagnostic equipment and evidence-based hypertension medications with or without the implementation strategy developed in the formative phase.