AIDS Care and the Importance of Community Involvement
We live on one planet, all of us, together. We have no way of getting off this planet to start all over again somewhere else. And although we may still consider ourselves "Americans," "South Africans," "Chinese," "Uzbeks," or some other nationality, the geographic lines are being blurred more and more as cultures cross them, moving from one place to the next, carrying their values and beliefs along. Beyond the global economy, iPods, and cell phones, this trend is quite noticeable in the field of global health, where not only do infectious diseases now seem to travel easily, but where we also see patients at clinics in New York's Chinatown who are very similar to those we see at clinics in Phnom Penh, and where patients in public healthcare centers in Minnesota hold to some of the same cultural beliefs as their distant cousins in Botswana or Nigeria.
In the past, we didn't pay too much attention to the similarities in healthcare issues that seemed to ignore the existence of our proclaimed boundaries. Instead, we highlighted the differences between resource-poor and resource-rich settings. But all of this is changing rapidly, with the HIV pandemic acting as the catalyst to a global awareness among healthcare providers and other colleagues working in this field.
Frequently patients in the so-called "developed" countries suffer some of the same barriers to AIDS care as their counterparts in the developing world. Furthermore, these patients often live in poverty in our society and belong to immigrant groups that may or may not speak our national languages. Although as a society we may have more resources than countries in the developing world, the issues affecting access to AIDS care in our communities include the lack of transport and large distances between patients' homes and the clinics, stigma and discrimination, a lack of understanding of HIV and AIDS care, lack of prevention materials in patients' native languages, few healthcare workers in the clinics who speak the patients' native languages, or alternatively a lack of translators able to facilitate between the patients and their healthcare providers. Do we recognize this from our work overseas? Is there a global strategy to be applied to AIDS care?
We live on one planet, all of us, together. We have no way of getting off this planet to start all over again somewhere else. And although we may still consider ourselves "Americans," "South Africans," "Chinese," "Uzbeks," or some other nationality, the geographic lines are being blurred more and more as cultures cross them, moving from one place to the next, carrying their values and beliefs along. Beyond the global economy, iPods, and cell phones, this trend is quite noticeable in the field of global health, where not only do infectious diseases now seem to travel easily, but where we also see patients at clinics in New York's Chinatown who are very similar to those we see at clinics in Phnom Penh, and where patients in public healthcare centers in Minnesota hold to some of the same cultural beliefs as their distant cousins in Botswana or Nigeria.
In the past, we didn't pay too much attention to the similarities in healthcare issues that seemed to ignore the existence of our proclaimed boundaries. Instead, we highlighted the differences between resource-poor and resource-rich settings. But all of this is changing rapidly, with the HIV pandemic acting as the catalyst to a global awareness among healthcare providers and other colleagues working in this field.
Frequently patients in the so-called "developed" countries suffer some of the same barriers to AIDS care as their counterparts in the developing world. Furthermore, these patients often live in poverty in our society and belong to immigrant groups that may or may not speak our national languages. Although as a society we may have more resources than countries in the developing world, the issues affecting access to AIDS care in our communities include the lack of transport and large distances between patients' homes and the clinics, stigma and discrimination, a lack of understanding of HIV and AIDS care, lack of prevention materials in patients' native languages, few healthcare workers in the clinics who speak the patients' native languages, or alternatively a lack of translators able to facilitate between the patients and their healthcare providers. Do we recognize this from our work overseas? Is there a global strategy to be applied to AIDS care?
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