AIDS instruction in US schools of social work: 20 years into the epidemic

AIDS at 30: Implications for Social Work Education

“…Toward the end of the second decade, studies focusing on other indicators of HIV/AIDS content uncovered some signs of progress, particularly in the areas of specialized coursework and field education. In a 1999 survey of 108 MSW programs (response rate 83.7%), Koob and Harvan (2003) found that 43% of responding programs offered HIV-specific elective courses, a substantial increase from Diaz and Kelly's (1991) findings a decade earlier. Koob and Harvan also reported that 88% of responding programs offered field placements in HIV/AIDS-focused settings, providing many students with the opportunity to learn about HIV/AIDS through direct experience.…”

“…One-third of MSW programs reported offering an HIV/AIDS elective and 75% provided at least one field placement in HIV/AIDS-related practice settings. Though a direct comparison should not be inferred between different samples, the proportion of MSW programs offering HIV-specific electives and placements suggests a slight decline from Koob and Harvan's (2003) survey the previous decade. Rowan and Shears postulated that some programs had dropped their HIV/AIDS electives in recent years, preferring a cross-curricular approach.…”

HIV/AIDS knowledge and attitudes among social work students: A comparative study

“…The social work discipline’s tenets and approaches have positioned it to play a highly useful role within efforts deployed to meet the complex challenges of managing the epidemic (Sacramento, 2015). Within the body of Canadian literature, only a very few studies have addressed HIV/AIDS knowledge and attitudes among populations of healthcare students (Hoffart et al, 2012; Jaworsky et al, 2017) and it is necessary to look further afield to identify research examining these themes in relation to populations of social work students (Handal, 2017; Koob and Harvan, 2003; Natale et al, 2010). Indeed, it seems that, over the last 20 years, few studies have aimed to examine HIV/AIDS knowledge and attitudes among higher education students in general (Cassidy et al, 2015; Labra et al, 2017).…”

“…Corroborating this forewarning, Wolf and Mitchell (2002) found that practitioners whose education had included components on HIV/AIDS were more likely to have conducted interventions than practitioners who had received no training related to the disease. Studies conducted outside Canada show that multiple social work training programmes fail to address HIV/AIDS themes, or do so summarily (Handal, 2017; Koob and Harvan, 2003; Natale et al, 2010; Rowan and Shears, 2011).…”

Modelling HIV/AIDS Transmission Dynamics Considering Counselling, Vaccination and Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) in a Population of Varying Size

“…Global and regional estimates of HIV have been provided by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO) since the late 1980s and country specific estimates since 1996 [25,8]. While the early 1980s AIDS cases were confined mostly to the homosexual men, hemophiliacs, and intravenous (IV) drug users in North America and Europe [5], today there is no geographical area, class, and cultural group of the world untouched by this pandemic [16]. It is common to the young and adults.…”