Previously submitted to: JMIR Mental Health (no longer under consideration since Feb 08, 2023)
Date Submitted: Feb 8, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Stigma and Discrimination Against People Living with HIV: A Qualitative Study of Health Provider’s Perspectives
ABSTRACT
Background:
Stigma and discrimination have been identified as the most important obstacles in the effective response to HIV patients' needs, since the beginning of the HIV epidemic. Stigma and discriminatory behaviors in healthcare providers (HCPs) toward people living with HIV (PLWHAs) are a challenge to public health and as well, a barrier to PLWHA's access and seeking health services, and adherence to ART anti-viral treatments.
Objective:
This study provides insight into stigmatized attitudes and discriminatory behaviors related to HIV/AIDS from the perspective of healthcare in Iran.
Methods:
The Thematic method was used to develop common themes from semi-structured interviews conducted between March 2021 and October 2021. Totally 38 in-depth interviews conducted with healthcare providers who had experience caring for HIV patients. Transcriptions were analyzed by thematic analysis approach. for categorizing conceptually similar themes, MAXQDA 2022 was used for the analysis and coding of the data.
Results:
Four main themes emerged from the data analysis, namely: “Social and individual values”, “Inadequate awareness and education”, “Lack of adherence to ethical principles”, and “insufficient policy-making and cultural development”. One of the most frequent codes found in this study was the fear of contracting a disease. In this study, fear was expressed in many different ways in several themes, including: Lack of understanding of the nature of the disease; absence of complete protective equipment; putting family and individual values before health.
Conclusions:
The results show that HIV-positive patients receive stigma and discrimination from the healthcare system for a variety of reasons, and these factors pose a major obstacle to controlling, preventing, and treating HIV/AIDS. Only by addressing the various aspects of this problem and adopting the appropriate policies can it be reduced. In order to address this issue, we must first break the taboo about this disease in society and then educate everyone about how to prevent and protect themselves through the media, schools, and universities. Clinical Trial: None
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© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.