Table 1.

Theme—time and financial benefits accruing from CASG participation

Sub-themes	Example quotations
Time savings	A focus group participant observed:
	“When she arrives at the facility, they make a note, and if she’s from CASG, he tells her not to get in the line … just to enter.”
	Another participant offered this reflection on CASG’s ability to reduce patient volume (and correspondingly, wait-time):
	“We join together to avoid always coming here together to the Doctor ….. in order to avoid the fill up [of patients] here in the hospital.”
Decreased work absences	A focus group participant explained how CASG participation could result in fewer work absences:
	“I got in mainly to know this will reduce the requests for excuses at work.…. in the work we always have problems, because the bosses … they ask you every time you go to the hospital, actually what do you have? I knew that [CASG] could reduce the problem of always having excuses…”
	While another focus group participant offered:
	“… before entering the [CASG] group, sometimes I had problems in coming for consults because I always had to come each month, with fear that they [your employers] still haven’t discovered I’m in this situation [have HIV].
Cost savings	A focus group participant shared how participating in CASG can help save money on transportation:
	“…we have to catch a bus and cross the bridge to here …. to catch one bus and another, sometimes you don’t have money or sometimes you work, and you don’t have time to go to the hospital every month.”
Pooling savings	A focus group participant offered how CASG participation can help in pooling savings:
	“CASG helps. It has benefits. For example, if my son were to be sick, my group manages to help me. It could be that I don’t have money …. in order to come to the hospital. My group gives me the money to come to the hospital.”