Care and treatment to extend the working lives of HIV-positive employees: calculating the benefits to business

The authors of this paper note that the human resource costs of HIV/AIDS are beginning to be considered by businesses. They state that when a business recognizes the threat posed by HIV among employees, it can pursue three basic response strategies for mitigating short- and long-term financial consequences:

• try to prevent new infections
• avoid or reduce the costs associated with existing and future infections; and
• provide treatment and support for infected employees to extend their productive working lives and thus postpone the costs of infection.

This paper assesses the potential benefits to South African businesses of the third strategy. The authors describe an approach and methodology for analyzing the benefits of interventions that extend the working life of employees and demonstrate such an analysis using published data on the costs of HIV/AIDS to companies. The analysis indicates that the benefits to companies of investments in treatment and care are likely to exceed the costs for some existing interventions. They argue that further work is needed to identify effective and affordable interventions, assess the benefits to companies of implementing the interventions, and bring these benefits to the attention of business and government leaders.[Authors]