Family-centered program models show promise to improve outcomes for children affected by HIV and AIDS.
Family-centered models of clinical service delivery should be widely applied as key health care services are scaled up in countries and communities affected by HIV and AIDS.
Family-centered social protection is vital to enable the best outcomes for children.
Institutional care for children should be strongly discouraged; alternative solutions through culturally appropriate fostering arrangements within extended family structures exist for the vast majority of AIDS-affected children, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa.
Services and support to families should be delivered through program mechanisms that are AIDS-sensitive, not AIDS-targeted.
More work is needed to document and evaluate mechanisms to optimize the participation of communities in the design and delivery of family-centered services, including income transfers and other social protection mechanisms
More work is needed to systematize and disseminate at regional and global levels the learning emerging from national experiences with provision of an integrated package of family-focused services for vulnerable children (e.g., Rwanda).
More operational and evaluation research is needed to fully document the impacts of family-centered health service delivery models, relative to conventional models with a primarily individual focus (e.g., in PMTCT).
More research is required to identify the specific forms of support to extended families that are most critical in enabling families to provide sustainable foster care to vulnerable children, avoiding institutional care in cases where other, family-based alternatives exist.
More research is needed to document options and best practices in integrating family-centered social protection mechanisms and health care services, with special attention to human resources questions
Additional work is needed to systematically document and analyze the political processes that have given rise to exceptionally innovative family-based policies and implementation models and built momentum to strengthen the social welfare sector in some countries
