HIV Treatment Adherence

Challenges for Social Services

Learn the latest social service interventions to promote HIV medication adherence

Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) can significantly improve the health outcomes of people living with HIV. Still, benefits rely on the steady adherence to the medication regimen as prescribed. Social Work and HIV: Challenges to Treatment Adherence is a practice-friendly resource with the latest HIV medication client adherence strategies and guidelines. This valuable book provides the tools for assessment of client adherence, and includes approaches and helpful guidelines to develop specialized counseling, social services, and provider training programs.

Treatment plans for HIV can be complicated and client adherence can hinge on several diverse factors. Social Work and HIV: Challenges to Treatment Adherence explains in detail how professionals can help individuals with HIV to stick to the prescribed medication plan. This book focuses on the daunting psychosocial, spiritual, and biomedical challenges that social workers, social service professionals, and healthcare providers often encounter and provides strategies to effectively address these issues. Innovations in adherence counseling and provider training programs are explored. Practitioners will learn psychosocial interventions that are empirically based, with predictors of adherence closely examined on how they may vary by gender, socioeconomic, and ethnocultural diversity. Co-occurring health and behavioral conditions, such as substance use, are considered in detail. Chapters are extensively referenced and several have tables and figures to clearly present data.

Topics in Social Work and HIV: Challenges to Treatment Adherence include:

• key themes within current treatment adherence research from the 2006 NIMH/IAPAC International Conference on HIV Treatment Adherence

• reviews of studies of psychosocial predictors of HAART among HIV positive clients

• research on the impact of support from partners, family, and health care providers has on medication adherence

• factors that predict medication adherence among HIV positive adults

• research on the differential effects of social and religious support and background variables on treatment adherence

• interventions to improve HAART adherence in methadone clinics

• specialized adherence counselors and their impact on adherence

• training to increase counselor knowledge of HIV medications, adherence strategies, and improved counseling skills

• studies on the prevalence of continued drug use and everyday adherence decision making

Social Work and HIV: Challenges to Treatment Adherence is a valuable resource for social workers; substance abuse counselors; social service and other health care providers; researchers; educators; and policy advocates. The book is also a relevant supplemental text for graduate courses in counseling; multi-systems interventions; community health; social development practice; research methods; and program evaluation as offered through departments of social work, public health, nursing, health psychology, community medicine, and interdisciplinary health professional training programs.