Stressors of living with HIV/AIDS: patients' perspectives

With the prospect of increasing numbers of patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), healthcare professionals (professionals) need to be better informed about patients' perspectives in order to provide efficacious, compassionate, and efficient care to patients. In Taiwan, the biomedical research and healthcare professionals' perspectives have dominated research related to HIV/AIDS. The purpose of the study was to investigate the stressors experienced by patients which have, thus far, been under-explored. This study used a phenomenological approach to gain insight into the patients' experience. In-depth, open-ended interviews were used to collect data. Interviews were tape recorded and transcribed verbatim to maintain data integrity and to reduce perceptual bias. The open coding procedure was used to analyze the interview transcripts. Study participants were 14 male patients with an average age of 35.71 year-old, who had known their positive HIV status for an average of 24.9 months. Patients experienced multiple stressors because of having the life threatening illness of HIV/AIDS. Their stressors were identified as follows: being confronted with the diagnosis, fear of disclosure, unpredictability of their physical condition, hypervigilance toward physical symptoms, emotional upheaval, and constrained life planning. The findings of this study form the basis for professionals to design services particularly addressed to patients' needs, for example, informed testing, and pre- and post-counseling. Further efforts could focus on developing systemic intervention programs to help patients better cope with the challenges of living with HIV/AIDS.