HIV education for health-care professionals in high prevalence countries: time to integrate a pre-service approach into training.

摘要

The HIV pandemic has placed an immense burden on the delivery of health-care services over the past two decades, especially in countries with high HIV prevalence. Ample finances, continuous logistical input, and adequately trained human resources are required to set up high quality HIV treatment programmes. The availability of skilled human resources remains one of the most serious obstacles to the roll-out of antiretroviral treatment programmes, and to the realisation of universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, and care by 2010. Inadequate training of health-care professionals about HIV leads to compromised patient care and perpetuates the spread of myths and other erroneous information that can negatively affect providers' attitudes toward people living with HIV/AIDS, to the extent that staff refuse to care for them.