LifeLube: Transgender HIV/AIDS Health Services Best Practices Guidelines

Friday, July 6, 2007

Transgender HIV/AIDS Health Services Best Practices Guidelines

Transgender HIV/AIDS Health Services Best Practices Guidelines

New guidelines for HIV/AIDS health services for transgender individuals have been developed by the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s HIV Health Services, which received a 2-year grant in 2000 from the HRSA/HAB Part C Capacity Building Grant Program. The Transgender Cultural Competency Training Project was developed to address disparities in access to services for HIV-infected transgender clients and to assist providers to improve the delivery of services to the transgender community. Efforts initiated with these funds came to fruition in the Project’s second year when the California State Office of AIDS partnered with HIV Health Services and the Pacific AIDS Education and Training Center (AETC) to develop the first state-wide, 2.5-day conference on transgender care and prevention. The conference, “Equality and Parity: A Statewide Action for Transgender HIV Prevention and Care,” proved a resounding success, attracting over 200 care and prevention professionals, as well as consumers, from throughout California.

One of the highlights of the Conference was a discussion among participants about the lack of standardized guidelines for serving transgender persons and the need for best practices, which could help to expand and improve the quality, scope, effectiveness, and outcomes of HIV-specific transgender care services. These guidelines could also serve as a keystone for implementing transgender specific services and for treating and serving transgender persons.

With a second HRSA Part C Capacity Building Grant in 2005, HIV Health Services developed HIV-specific transgender Best Practices guidelines. HIV Health Services partnered with the consulting firm of Harder+Co and an advisory board comprised of 17 experts in transgender care and preventions. The results of this collaboration are innovative, broad-based best practices guidelines that could be applied at various different levels of organizational development.

To download this document, go to the TARGET Center here.

The conference program for “Equality and Parity: A Statewide Action for Transgender HIV Prevention and Care” is available here.

In addition to the guidelines, a HRSA/HAB report based on a community consultation is also available. “HIV/AIDS in the Transgender Population: A Community Consultation Meeting” focuses on three major areas of need for the transgender community: 1) education; 2) research and data; and 3) access to resources. Click here.

1 comment:

AnonymousJuly 30, 2007 at 6:10 AM
Facing the Challenges of HIV/AIDS

Around the world, more than 47 million people are now infected with the HIV/AIDS, It is now a weapon of mankind destruction. It has killed more than 30 million people worldwide according to UNAID and WHO reports since the 1st of December 1981 when it was first recognized. This makes it the worst recorded pandemic in the history of pandemics against mankind. In 2006 alone, it was reported to have killed between 2.5 to 3.5 million people with more than 380000 as children. The large number of these people killed is from the sub Saharan Africa. In some Sub-Saharan African countries, HIV/AIDS is expected to lower life expectancy by as much as 25 years.

AIDS is no longer a problem of medication. It is a problem of development. It is not just an individual hardship. It also threatens to decimate the future prospects of poor countries, wiping away years of hard-won improvements in development indicators. As a result of the disease, many poor countries are witnessing a worsening in child survival rates, reduced life expectancy, crumbling and over-burdened health care systems, the breakdown of family structures and the decimation of a generation in the prime of their working lives.

Bangladesh's socio-economic status, traditional social ills, cultural myths on sex and sexuality and a huge population of marginalised people make it extremely vulnerable to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Everyone buying sex in Bangladesh is having unprotected sex some of the time, and a large majority don’t use condoms most of the time. Behaviors that bring the highest risk of infection in Bangladesh are unprotected sex between sex workers and their clients, needle sharing and unprotected sex between men.

Though the country overall has a low prevalence rate, it has reported concentrated epidemics among vulnerable population such as IDUs. There are already localized epidemics within vulnerable groups in, and the virus would spread among the IDUs’ family or sexual partner. According to the social development specialist and AIDS researcher Mohammad Khairul Alam, “It should be realized that there is no alternative to develop and enhance life skills of vulnerable girls and women to cope with epidemic. They may be assisted on the various levels to become engaged in grooming their confidence and organized. At the same time, their voices should be allowed to be heard loud and clear. Thus the collective effort of women is born with the sense or purpose that they will be stirred up to share perceptions improving their access to reproductive health related information and services.”

In many poor countries, commercial female sex workers are frequently exposed to HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs/STDs). Where sex workers have poor access to health care and HIV prevention services, HIV prevalence can be as high as 50-90%. Evidence shows that targeted prevention interventions in sex work settings can turn the pandemic around.

Bangladesh is a high prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, particularly among commercial sex workers; there are available injection drug users and sex workers all over the country, low condom use in the general population. Considering the high prevalence of HIV risk factors among the Bangladeshi population, HIV prevention research is particularly important for Bangladesh. It is very awful, several organization in Bangladesh are working only to prevent HIV/AIDS but few of them like as ‘Rainbow Nari O Shishu Kallyan Foundation’ try to develop proper strategic plane, so should increase research based organization recently.

Poverty in Bangladesh is a deeply entrenched and complex phenomenon. Sequentially, the HIV/AIDS epidemic amplifies and become deeper poverty by its serious economic impact on individuals, households and different sectors of the economy. Poverty is the reason why messages of prevention and control do not make an impact on a vast majority of the vulnerable population.

Sources: World Bank, UNAIDS, UNICEF.

Kh. Zahir Hossain
M & E Specialist (BWSPP)
The World Bank
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Mobile: 01711453171
Zahir.hossain@gmail.com
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Friday, July 6, 2007

Transgender HIV/AIDS Health Services Best Practices Guidelines

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