Mérida Positive: growing support networks in Yucatán
What a peer support network looks like when it is built by the people who need it, in a city where the nearest specialist clinic is a bus ride away.
By Jesús Suárez
Mérida Positive started the way most durable community projects start: a handful of people who kept meeting anyway, in a city where the formal support on offer amounted to a leaflet and a referral.
Peer support is a service, not a supplement
Clinical care answers a narrow question well. It is much less good at the questions that determine whether someone stays in care at all — how to tell a partner, what to do when the pharmacy is out of stock, whether the person at the desk will be the same one as last time.
Those are peer questions. Answering them is not softer work than clinical work; it is the work that keeps clinical work from being wasted.
What the network runs
- Weekly peer groups, including one in Maya as well as Spanish.
- Accompaniment to appointments, for anyone who would rather not go alone.
- A treatment-interruption phone tree that has restarted more people on ART than any campaign we have run.
- Training for the two nearest public clinics, delivered by the members who use them.
What we have learned
The phone tree is the part worth copying. It costs almost nothing and it catches the thing formal systems miss: a person who has stopped collecting medication is usually not lost to follow-up, they are having a bad month, and someone they know noticing is enough.
The network's own summary: nobody drops out of care in a week. They drop out over months, quietly, while everyone assumes someone else is checking.
Read more about the community programmes this sits alongside on what we do.
