Health care providers and HIV

The current investigation seeks to examine the attitudes and beliefs of health care providers in Canada about people living with HIV. The line of research consists of three studies. Study 1 was a qualitative study conducted with a critical lens. The critical lens was used in a series of four focus groups when qualitatively soliciting opinions about the range of attitudes, behaviours and cognitions health care providers may have towards people living with HIV. Study 2 used the information gathered from Study 1 to develop a scale to assess HIV stigma in health care providers. Items were created from examples and themes found in the qualitative study, and were tested via exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, test-retest reliability analysis, and assessed for convergent and divergent validity. Study 3 examined the newly developed scale’s relationship to proposed overlapping stigmas and attitudes, and tested the adapted intersectional model of HIV-related stigma with health care trainees using the newly developed HIV stigma scale as an outcome measure. The line of research found that HIV stigma continues to be a significant problem in the health care system. The scale developed in Study 2 demonstrates that HIV stigma can be conceptualized and assessed as a tripartite model of discrimination, stereotyping and prejudice, and that this conceptualization of HIV stigma supports an intersectional model of overlapping stigmas with homophobia, racism, stigma against injection drug use and stigma against sex work.