Pregnant women with HIV are less likely to be discriminated against in hospitals

Non-profit partnership "E.V.A." summarized the results of a project in which a study was conducted of barriers to services for HIV-positive pregnant women in hospitals and social institutions. This was reported by the Social Information Agency.

Experts interviewed almost a thousand respondents from the Astrakhan, Ivanovo, Leningrad, Novosibirsk and Tyumen regions, Krasnodar and Khabarovsk territories, the republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, as well as St. Petersburg.

Based on these data, experts came to the conclusion that discrimination in medical institutions is gradually decreasing compared to 2013-2014. For example, notes about HIV began to disappear from the covers of medical records.

In addition, the study showed that HIV-positive women often use ineffective methods of contraception - 85% of respondent pregnancies occurred “by accident.”

Only 25% of women with HIV received a breast milk substitute as part of a program to prevent mother-to-child transmission, experts write. The rest were forced to buy expensive mixtures themselves.

In the Tyumen Region and Khabarovsk Territory, women are forced to travel more than 250 kilometers one way every two months to get to the AIDS center and receive the necessary medications.

During the project, staff provided support to HIV-positive pregnant women.

“As you know, the period from the moment a woman finds out about pregnancy until the child is removed from the register at the AIDS center takes at least 25 months. During this entire period, not a single doctor or nurse, even the most cordial ones, can support a woman for a long time in the most alarming moments, when she needs to ask a question and receive a detailed, accessible answer. This is why our project started working,” said the head of the study, Natalya Utrovskaya.

Pregnant women with HIV told TDs about how doctors and others treated them, and about how to give birth to a healthy child.