HIV prevention within maternal-child health services has increased in many developing countries, but many HIV-infected women in developing countries still receive insufficient postnatal care. This study explored the experience of 30 HIV-infected women in Vietnam in accessing HIV-related postnatal care, the role of felt and enacted stigma in accessing services, and the effects of participation in a self-help group on utilization of available services. Many HIV-infected women were not provided with adequate information on postnatal care by health workers. Most women reported both felt and enacted stigma that affected their access to care. Involvement in self-help groups improved the women's self-esteem, increased knowledge about HIV, and had a positive effect on both felt and enacted stigma from family, community, and health services. These results suggest the need for better information provision and better referral systems within the health services and suggest that establishing self-help groups can diminish felt stigma and facilitate access to services for women and their children.

Background: According to Vietnamese policy, HIV-infected women should have access at least to HIV testing and Nevirapine prophylaxis, or where available, to adequate counselling, HIV infection staging, ARV prophylaxis, and infant formula. Many studies in high HIV prevalence settings have reported low coverage of PMTCT services, but there have been few reports from low HIV prevalence settings, such as Asian countries. We investigated the access of HIV-infected pregnant women to PMTCT services in the well-resourced setting of the capital city, Hanoi.

Critically ill or immobilized patients are unable to stand for their height to be measured; therefore, knee height measurement is a useful proxy. In order to address this problem, a lot of research has been carried out worldwide to create equations to estimate the stature of adults. However, knee and total height may differ among racial/ethnic groups. This study therefore determined the applicability of equations to estimate stature derived from American and Taiwanese research and then established a new equation from a group of 512 Vietnamese patients aged 18 to 64 years. In this study, 512 patients were divided into 2 groups, the established equation group (n = 400, 214 men and 186 women) and the validated equation group (n = 112, 61 men and 51 women). Based on the linear regression model, the new equation is: body height = 2.12 × knee height + 59.06 (cm) in males and body height = 2.09 × knee height + 57.37 (cm) in females. We calculated the heights of patients based on their knee heights with both equations and then compared the results with their measured standing heights. The results from the American and Taiwanese knee height equations both showed that the difference was statistically significant with a P < .05 between the indirect method of stature estimation with actual body height. In contrast, the new equation was more accurate with a P > .05. Stature estimated from the new knee height equation is suitable for the Vietnamese population in clinical setting.