The Role of Nurses in Preventing the Spread of HIV/AIDS among Risk Populations

RUNNING HEAD: NURSING AND HIV/AIDS
1
The Role of Nurses in Preventing the Spread of HIV/AIDS among Risk Populations
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NURSES AND HIV/AIDS 2
The Role of Nurses in Preventing the Spread of HIV/AIDS among Risk Populations
HIV/AIDS is a global health challenge that has affected both the public and nursing
professionals since HIV was detected. Since the beginning of the pandemic, (Bórquez, 2017)
connotes that nurses have been at the forefront in responding to victims to help them manage the
fatal disease. Nurses are often involved in every stage of the trajectory from counseling newly
diagnosed patients to the last breath at the point of death of the infected patients. The central
theme of this paper is evaluating the roles of nurses in the prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS
among the risk population such as women and children. In so doing; the paper shall consider the
relationship between nursing and the Social Determinants of Health and Primary Health Care;
the public health mandates of the nurses; risk management of the patients and those close to
them, and the participative intervention methods of health promotion (Demarco, 2019).
HIV/AIDS pandemic is proven to constitute a health problem of exceptional proportion
for the global public health. Towards the end of the 20th century, it is still as though it is a new
plaque, an aspect that shows the control and prevention from spreading to the vulnerable
population is still an havoc to the health industry. According to (Martinez, 2017), nurses and
other health professionals have a vital role to play, an aspect that requires specific interventions
that are relevant to their qualifications as the skills are necessary at the primary, tertiary, or
secondary levels of the disease prevention. At the primary stage, the education towards
prevention and social behavior takes the center stage. At the secondary level after a patient has
acquired the disease, nurses become vital in teaching healthy behaviors necessary for the patients
to live with the disease. Therefore, counseling and provision of health information becomes
essential for those at risk such as sexual partners and children. At the tertiary level, nursing
interventions become essential to promote the quality of the individual life while helping the

NURSES AND HIV/AIDS 3
patients to deal with anger, sadness, discouragements, fears, and stigma that follows (Guise,
Albers & Strathdee, 2016). Therefore, the role played by nurses is often not recognized even
though they are always at the center of the response to any public health crisis. For instance, in
the first professional to die in the most recent outbreak of Ebola in Congo was a nurse. At the
beginning of diagnosis for HIV/AIDS, nurses are expected to provide the bulk of care for the risk
population as well as the infected patients. Apart from the counseling of the diagnosed patients,
nurses provide a point of care HIV tests and a ton other indispensable services that they offer to
the communities in which they work.
The relationship between Nursing and Social Determinants of Health and Primary Health Care
As aforementioned, nursing exists at the epicenter of the medical profession and the
prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS is heavily dependent on the knowledge that nurses pass to
the societies within which they are. However, to understand the relationship between the
profession of Nursing and the social determinants of health and public health care, one must
understand what the two paradigms entail. Social Determinants of Health are the societal factors
such as wealth and education that are responsible for healthcare inequalities. They are all the
structural, non-medical factors that determine the wellbeing of a person. Generally, people who
are financially better off, for instance, are more likely to afford better healthcare, which might be
problematic to those who are financially incapable of attaining healthcare. SDH influence the
incidence and spread of HIV/AIDS in that the pandemic is more prevalent in developing
countries than it is in developed countries (Guise, Albers & Strathdee, 2016).
Primary Health Care is yet another paradigm concerned with healthcare inequality and
the ultimate spread of HIV/AIDS among risk populations. Primary Health Care adopted an