WHAT IS COACH MPILO?
Coach Mpilo is a reimagined peer navigator/case manager model for men.
It employs men with HIV who are stable on treatment as ‘coaches’ of newly diagnosed men and men who have returned to care after a treatment interruption. (We refer to these men internally but not externally as ‘players’).
A coach provides ongoing guidance and support, rooted in his own personal experience living with HIV, from the point of diagnosis or return to care to the point of treatment stability and viral suppression.
A coach helps men see treatment as a strategy for gaining control over HIV and feeling strong, healthy, safe, desirable and, ultimately, normal again. He helps them reach a point where they can live openly and confidently with HIV, without any of the fear and shame that they might have felt initially.
What Coach is not:
He is not a nurse.
While he receives basic training on key topics like viral suppression, he is not intended to be a source of technical information or advice
He is not a tracker-tracer
Many men perceive tracker-tracers as badgering and coercive. While Coach’s aim is also to get his men (back) onto treatment, his approach centres on providing personalized support that helps a man overcome his barriers and lessen his likelihood of having another treatment lapse, not just getting him back to the clinic.
He is not a data capturer
Coaches can collaborate with M&E staff to ensure that basic information is recorded, but his unique value is in working with men, not with data. Should he need to be involved in data entry, additional training may be required.
“When you help players, you can’t just leave them. They see me as their friend. I have over 200 players on my facebook. We agreed that after COVID we will all get together.”
— Coach, Ugu District
How is Coach Mpilo different?
“Men know they can talk to me and so they do. Most times I don’t have to say anything, just listen. They talk and talk and talk until they work out themselves what they have to. I don’t have to do much, just listen.”
— Coach, Ugu District
Empathetic support from a true peer is what differentiates other approaches to reaching men.
As another man living with HIV, Coach is someone a man can immediately trust and open up to, without fear of stigma or judgment. Someone who can give credible advice on overcoming barriers because he has faced them himself.
Coaches must always be men living with HIV. While other cadres have an important role to play, we would never call them coaches unless they have the lived experience of a man with HIV.
The messenger is the message. Before he even says a word, Coach is living proof that everything is going to be ok.
“I overheard a coach talking to a man and then I understood what coach Mpilo is all about. He can talk to that man in a way I could never do. Men [living with HIV] can communicate with each other like that.”
— Clinic Nurse, Ugu District