Caring for Individuals with HIV/AIDS

While I was a student at UBC, I was especially interested in learning about HIV/AIDS and how it affects oral health care. I completed a community rotation at Positive Living Society BC providing dental hygiene services for individuals living with HIV. I also took my elective in Interdisciplinary Health & Human Services which was an interprofessional course that focused on the management and care of people living with HIV/AIDS. At the time, the UBC Dental Hygiene program was also trying to integrate point of care HIV testing into our community clinics, which was basically a finger prick blood test that we could perform chair-side with a client (see photo below).

All of these experiences helped me gain a lot of insight and understanding towards working with clients with HIV. Providing care for so many clients, listening to personal stories, and advocating for the normalization of regular HIV testing definitely made me more comfortable and sensitive to this community's unique challenges and needs. I think it's interesting how certain conditions such as STIs tend to carry negative stigmas, but as health care professionals we need to have the education and compassion to not propagate these ideas. It was also great to find out that early signs of HIV manifest in the oral cavity, so dental hygienists are key players in the recognition and recommendation for testing. I'm very grateful that I had the opportunity to learn so much about HIV/AIDS during my undergrad and feel sufficiently equipped to care for individuals in the future.

Pictured: HIV point of care test. Visit the BC Centre for Disease Control website for more details: http://www.bccdc.ca/our-services/programs/point-of-care-rapid-hiv-testing

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