White House to Convene Symposium on Quality of Life for People with HIV

With medical advances enabling people diagnosed with HIV to live longer and healthier lives, our nation’s response has increasingly focused on improving quality of life. Furthering this focus, the White House Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP) is convening Enhancing the Lives of People with HIV—A Quality of Life Symposium. To ensure broad participation, ONAP is offering a virtual optionExit Disclaimer for key portions of the summit on Thursday, December 5, 2024, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. EST. Taking place during the week of World AIDS Day, this symposium will honor those we have lost to HIV and those who are surviving.

This symposium will address core aspects of quality of life—including mental health, housing, nutrition, and employment—and aims to foster a shared understanding of what quality of life means for people living with HIV. The Quality of Life Symposium centers voices of people with HIV, bringing together both lifetime and long-term survivors alongside researchers, leaders from community organizations, and federal officials. The meeting will include panel discussions on understanding and defining quality of life for people living with HIV, HIV and aging, and federal partnerships to achieve enhanced quality of life for people with HIV.

The National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS) Federal Implementation Plan, released in August 2022, introduced five quality-of-life focused indictors of progress. These five indicators reflect the multidimensional nature of quality of life among people with HIV—addressing self-rated health status, mental health, food insecurity, employment status, and unstable housing or homelessness. Federal agencies and community organizations have been working to address quality of life and the five indicators alongside the other goals and indicators included in the NHAS.