Underutilisation of routinely collected data in the HIV programme in Zambia: a review of quantitatively analysed peer-reviewed articles

BACKGROUND: The extent to which routinely collected HIV data from Zambia has been used in peer-reviewed published articles remains unexplored. This paper is an analysis of peer-reviewed articles that utilised routinely collected HIV data from Zambia within six programme areas from 2004 to 2014. METHODS: Articles on HIV, published in English, listed in the Directory of open access journals, African Journals Online, Google scholar, and PubMed were reviewed. Only articles from peer-reviewed journals, that utilised routinely collected data and included quantitative data analysis methods were included. Multi-country studies involving Zambia and another country, where the specific results for Zambia were not reported, as well as clinical trials and intervention studies that did not take place under routine care conditions were excluded, although community trials which referred patients to the routine clinics were included. Independent extraction was conducted using a predesigned data collection form. Pooled analysis was not possible due to diversity in topics reviewed. RESULTS: A total of 69 articles were extracted for review. Of these, 7 were excluded. From the 62 articles reviewed, 39 focused on HIV treatment and retention in care, 15 addressed prevention of mother-to-child transmission, 4 assessed social behavioural change, and 4 reported on voluntary counselling and testing. In our search, no articles were found on condom programming or voluntary male medical circumcision. The most common outcome measures reported were CD4+ count, clinical failure or mortality. The population analysed was children in 13 articles, women in 16 articles, and both adult men and women in 33 articles. CONCLUSION: During the 10 year period of review, only 62 articles were published analysing routinely collected HIV data in Zambia. Serious consideration needs to be made to maximise the utility of routinely collected data, and to benefit from the funds and efforts to collect these data. This could be achieved with government support of operational research and publication of findings based on routinely collected Zambian HIV data.