Effects Of An Intervention Reducing Discrimination Toward People Living With HIV/AIDS Among Medical Students

Background:The spread of HIV/AIDS prevalence initiates intense response and the discrimination toward People Living with HIV/AIDS(PLWHA) is common.The discrimination from medical staff is an important part.Students of medical college are main strength of medical staff in future,so their discriminatory attitude toward PLWHA will affect their actions.Objectives:First,to describe the condition of discriminatory attitude toward PLWHA among medical students.Second,to explore the effects of intervention for reducing AIDS discrimination.At last,to evaluate the effectiveness of the procedure.Methods:A quasi-experimental study was used in the study.One hundred and fourty subjects were sampled convinently and each group had seventy subjects.The study group received the intervention of reducing AIDS discrimination,while the control group didn't receive any intervention.The intervention consisted of AIDS knowledge,affection and skill training and it costed thirteen hours.Many methods were used such as having an informal discussion with PLWHA,clinical study in AIDS ward,lecture,role playing, broadcasting video,etc.The discriminatory attitude of the subjects were measured by questionairs before and after the intervention,first month,3th months and 6th months after the intervention.Results:123 subjects finished the whole data collection,62 subjects in the study group and 61 patients in the control group.Medical college students have discriminatory attitude toward PLWHA indeed.After intervention,the study group had lower discriminatory attitude than the baseline and the control group.The attitude consisted of two parts:the general AIDS discriminatory attitude and medicine related AIDS discriminatory attitude.Conclusions:The findings of this study demonstrate that it is necessary and possible to carry out a short and allround intervention of reducing AIDS discrimination on the base of professional education in medical college.Otherwise,it is effective and worthy of offering such intervention to more medical colleges and other domains.