Pharmacy Student Attitudes and Willingness to Engage in Care with People Living with HIV/AIDS

Abstract

Objective. To describe the extent to which pharmacy students hold negative attitudes toward people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and to determine whether background variables, student knowledge, and professional attitudes may affect willingness to care for PLWHA.Methods. An online survey tool was developed and administered to 150 pharmacy students in their third professional year. Descriptive and stepwise multivariate regressions were performed. Results. While descriptive results showed a majority of respondents had favorable professional attitudes towards caring for PLWHA, most pharmacy students expressed discomfort with specific attitudes about being in close physical contact and receiving selected services from PLWHA. Multivariate results revealed that: (1) being a minority predicted greater knowledge; (2) having received prior HIV instruction and greater HIV knowledge predicted more positive professional attitudes caring for PLWHA; (3) being more socially liberal, having more positive professional attitudes caring for PLWHA, and having greater empathy towards PLWHA predicted student willingness to provide services. Conclusion. Future educational interventions specifically targeted toward socially conservative whites may impact greater student willingness to care for PLWHA. Additional research should also explore the generalizability of the present findings and modeling to pharmacy students in other regions of the country.

Developing AIDS Knowledge and AIDS Attitude Scales and Assessing their Reliability and Validity

“…investigated the level of knowledge of and attitudes toward HIV/AIDS (Avcıkurt, 2014;Haroun, Saleh, Wood, Morzouqi, & Anouti, 2016;Peltzer & Pengpid, 2017;Rickles, Furtek, Malladi, & Zhou, 2016;Siyez & Siyez, 2009). However, none of the Turkish studies used de novo AIDS knowledge and attitude scales which were psychometrically tested.…”

Assessment of Pharmacy Student Perceptions Toward Common Stigmas Associated with Persons Living with HIV

“…26 Probing questions that require students to face their misgivings toward PLWH can challenge students to expand their perspectives about the roles that they might play as health care providers serving the HIV population. [15][16][17][18]26,28 The purpose of this project was to generate greater appreciation among pharmacy students about the plight of PLWH and to assess pharmacy students' perspectives toward various stigmas that regularly confront PLWH.…”

“…14 It is also important to acknowledge and address erroneous assumptions or unfounded apprehensions that students might harbor toward disenfranchised patients, to enable them to manifest the expectation of providing the same standard of care to all patients. 13,[15][16][17][18] Because personal exposure to PLWH is variable among pharmacy students, creative approaches are warranted to promote greater awareness of the impact that an HIV diagnosis can have on PLWH. 13 Instructional modalities have been designed to educate health care professionals and students about myths and inequities experienced by PLWH.…”

“…[19][20][21][22][23][24][25] Classroom environments serve as versatile training grounds for counteracting HIV stigmatizing beliefs. [15][16][17][18]26,28 Panel discussions that…”

Predicción de actitud hacia personas con VIH/SIDA y hacerse prueba del VIH

“…Tras la revisión de investigaciones sobre actitud hacia PVVS y hacerse la prueba del VIH centradas en variables psicosociales y publicadas durante las dos últimas décadas, siete variables destacaron como correlatos o predictores significativos. Retomando las mismas, el modelo propuesto para predecir actitud hacia PVVS y hacerse la prueba del VIH incluye el sexo como predictor sociodemográfico (Dahlui et al, 2015;Kikwasi, Lukwale y Mwageni, 2017;Masoudnia, 2015;Tang et al, 2016), la orientación sexual (Boone et al, 2016) y tener amigos homosexuales (Burke et al, 2015;Knaak y Patten, 2016;Prati et al, 2016) como predictores relacionados con los grupos de identidad o pertenencia y experiencias vividas, la actitud hacia personas homosexuales (Suominen et al, 2015;Vaughn, Teeters, Sadler y Cronan, 2017) como otra actitud hacia un objeto relacionado, la religiosidad (Reyes, Varas y Martínez, 2015) como predictor ideológico (desde valores cristianos católicos o no católicos) y el autoritarismo de ala derecha (Rickles, Furtek, Malladi, Ng y Zhou, 2016) como predictor ideológico (de derechas) y de rasgo (rigidez autoritaria).…”