Q: What’s behind the success of Iris House’s viral suppression rates?
A: What helps our clients is our support services. You can’t just focus on the medical. Providing services such as support groups with like-minded people makes them more accountable. Many of our case managers do home visits. Other support services and hospitals won’t do that. But in home visits, we get to understand more of that person; we can see, for example, signs of depression or substance abuse. And we provide services that are gender responsive. Women are going to focus on family and kids first. We don’t want you to be able to say, “I couldn’t come because I couldn’t find a babysitter.” So we provide structured recreation and socialization for the kids while their parents are seeing their case managers or taking a workshop.