What Do Care Providers Need to Know?

The day is quiet (except for my radio, but the other staff are kindly not mentioning it if it’s too loud) and I’m thinking about a short presentation I’ll be giving soon. My job is to talk to future health care providers about PWN and what we do, particularly in terms of community connections and positive prevention.

I’ll be meeting a group of students in Interprofessional Health and Human Service at UBC who are taking a course dedicated to HIV/AIDS.  This group could include students from pharmacy, nursing, social work, medicine or food nutrition and health. In other words, students who, once they’ve finished their schooling, will be delivering important care and support to people with HIV.  What do I emphasize in just the few minutes I’m allotted?

These students are doing a month long intensive course, so they have a lot information to absorb about HIV medically, socially and from a health management perspective. I think I’ll touch on diagnosis, and the general issues that women face to create a context to place it all in. But beyond that, I want to emphasize that in their roles providing health care or social support, it’s vital to consider every person individually. Because every woman has a different story about how she became infected – what she knew or didn’t know about HIV transmission, pressures that affected the choices she made (or couldn’t make) – supporting her prevention efforts means getting to know her and hearing what she wants or needs. It’s about creating a space where honest and non-judgmental discussion can happen.

Stigma and discrimination against women with HIV is unfortunately still alive and well, as a recent US study shows. Providing respectful support and care means busting out of this. I want to challenge each of the students to look beyond the group statistics of X number of women with HIV in BC and think about just one woman: the one that appears for care. She’s the one that matters most.

- Janet 

This was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 9:58 am and is filed under Education & Resources, HIV Prevention . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.

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