Outstanding Early Career Researchers Awards 2025: Meet the winners - Dr Jienchi Dorward

What is your main area of research interest, and how did this interest develop?

The main focus of my research has been to identify ways to improve HIV management in primary care in South Africa, through clinical trials of point-of-care diagnostics, evaluations of community treatment programmes, and epidemiological analyses of new anti-retroviral regimens. I was also fortunate to get the opportunity to work on the PRINCIPLE and PANORAMIC trials, the UK-wide Urgent Public Health trials of community COVID-19 treatments. I really enjoy working with a range of different, highly skilled people through research, and love the feeling when you first get the results of a study and have found out something new about how the world works.

What does your research involve, what challenges presented themselves during the research, and how did you overcome them?

My primary care HIV research has mainly involved working in collaboration with South African colleagues to manage our clinical trials and epidemiological analyses of routinely collected primary care data. One of the biggest challenges was trying to continue these projects during COVID-19, where South Africa had some of the most severe travel and lockdown restrictions, which meant a lot of our projects were delayed. However, we managed to leverage some of the research infrastructure to instead look at the impact of COVID-19 on South African primary care HIV services. I was also able to join the team of the PRINCIPLE and PANORAMIC trials. These novel, adaptive, platform trials were some of the largest and fastest recruiting primary care COVID-19 trials globally, and being involved exposed me to a whole new level of research which I am very grateful for.

What will the RCGP/SAPC Early Career Award enable you to do?

I am very grateful for this award and will use it towards the costs of travel to South Africa to meet with clinicians and researchers to establish a collaboration that evaluates management of cardiovascular disease (CVD) among people living with HIV in primary care in South Africa.

Currently, HIV management in primary care is highly ‘siloed’ with separate funding streams and monitoring and evaluation of outcomes, which goes against the integrated primary care approach. As people with HIV are at higher risk of CVD than people without HIV, this siloing can lead to avoidable morbidity and mortality through missed opportunities for primary and secondary CVD disease prevention. Our potential collaboration could leverage existing datasets to investigate the prevalence of risk factors for CVD, predicted CVD risk, and the prevalence of treatment with statins among people living with and without HIV. If differences are found in the HIV versus non-HIV positive groups, we would then explore barriers to statin use and other lifestyle risk reduction strategies using qualitative method(s). We would need to apply for further funding for this project, but the RCGP/SAPC Early Career Award will be crucial in exploring potential collaborations, refining ideas and getting partners on board. The ultimate aim would be to provide evidence on how to better integrate HIV care and CVD risk prevention in South African primary care.