Statistics show that about 25 percent of adults in Uganda have hypertension. The numbers are as high as 29 percent among adults living with HIV who are on Antiretroviral Treatment (ART).

While there has been a rise in cases of hypertension among people living with HIV, health care services have not always made it easy for such patients to receive treatment under one roof. It has always been that a patient diagnosed with hypertension had to be referred to a separate specialist heart clinic for hypertension treatment.

Hypertensive people living with HIV often receive services for hypertension and HIV in separate clinics. This leads to undiagnosed and untreated hypertension among people living with HIV due to the time, costs and stigma that comes with seeking treatment from multiple clinics. This approach is not patient centered, is costly and inefficient for both HIV and hypertension control.

With funding from Resolve to Save Lives, we are now providing integrated HIV and hypertension care at the Mulago ISS clinic through the LINKS project. Through a partnership with Novartis Access which is providing quality hypertension treatment to MJAP at a subsidized cost, people living with HIV diagnosed with hypertension are now able to receive hypertension treatment at the clinic at no cost, making MJAP’s Mulago ISS clinic the first one-stop center for HIV and hypertension treatment in Uganda.