ABSTRACT
A hospital based interventional study was done at Anti Retroviral Therapy centre (ART) of SMS Medical College during August 2010 to January 2011 with the objectives of finding out the proportion of patients who did not adhere to ART, its associated factors, reasons for non-compliance and determine the effect of reinforced counselling through interpersonal communication addressing patient specific reasons and solution for increasing compliance. There were 2841 HIV patients on ART during study period and on an average 381 (13%) of them did not adhere to ART. Age, literacy, unemployment, presence of co-infections were significantly associated with non-compliance while marital status, sex of patient, area of living, family size, distance from ART centre and type of ART regime were not associated with non-compliance. Reasons stated for not coming to collect drugs or not consuming them were mainly patients were travelling, forget to take the pills, no one was there to accompany them, no money for fare, busy in agriculture or other day to day activities. 100 randomly selected non-compliant patients were offered reinforced counselling with focus on patient specific reasons for non compliance and with an intention to encourage the patients to come up with solutions in prevailing circumstances. 74 patients started taking drugs regularly at the end of study. One patient out of these hundred died during study period.