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potential barriers related to lack of confidentiality, and prove to be equal and possibly not inferior to facility-
widespread stigma and discrimination. In addition, based ones and warrant further investigation. The
designing CB-ARTi initiatives that are integrated apparent promise and pitfalls of CB-ARTi and the
into general health campaigns can also address the potential increasing interest of policymakers in its potential as a
lack of confidentiality. Community-based ART initiation strategy to increase linkage to care and ART uptake in the
models should therefore include assessments for non- era of UTT indicate that careful monitoring of the evidence
communicable diseases, screening for sexually transmitted base is warranted.
infections and tuberculosis (TB), HIV pre-exposure
prophylaxis (PrEP) and other HIV prevention services, Acknowledgements
family planning services, as well as alcohol and drug
rehabilitation services. Finally, further research is needed Competing interests
regarding the impact and estimated costs, as well as the The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
cost-effectiveness of CB-ARTi models.
Authors’ contributions
Limitations R.C. conceptualised the project, the main conceptual ideas,
Our results and conclusions might be susceptible to and drafted the first manuscript. Both R.C. and A.R.
the bias related to the limits of a rapid review. These contributed to the final version of the manuscript. A.R.
include restricting the search to literature published in supervised the project.
English language and two electronic databases (although
we used the PubMed database that contains by far the Funding information
most significant number of health and medical journals). This research was funded by the University of KwaZulu-
The search was also complemented by grey literature Natal through a PhD studentship bursary awarded to R.C. by
searches from major HIV-related conferences, clinical the College of Health Sciences.
trial databases and brief technical expert consultations.

Data availability statement
A second limitation is that only one author screened and
selected the titles and abstracts from the total set of documents Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data
retrieved, extracted data from all eligible articles and assessed were created or analysed in this study.
the quality of evidence and RoB. However, this author is
knowledgeable about the content area. The second author Disclaimer
checked all the extractions for accuracy and verified the
quality of evidence and RoB assessment. The views and opinions expressed in this article are
those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the
official policy or position of any affiliated agency of
As a result of the heterogeneity in intervention, study
design, location and definition of outcomes measured, we the authors.
were not able to combine the results to estimate overall
intervention effect or draw conclusions on the relative References
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ART initiation. Varying definitions of the outcomes of AIDS epidemic by 2030. Geneva: Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS;
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and the final results with higher numbers of participants jama.2018.1818
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information on the topic of CB-ARTi. However, after 6. Wyatt MA, Pisarski E., Krows B, et al. Community-based ART initiation, delivery
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[cited 2018 Feb 27]. p. 1–7. Available from: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/
results reached earlier suggest that CB-ARTi models could show/NCT02929992

http://www.sajhivmed.org.za 238 Open Access