Social Work and HIV

Social Work and HIV: The Canadian Experience brings together essays by front-line workers and researchers from across the country. The essayists describe their own successes and failures in dealing with the effects of HIV in rural communities, urban Aboriginal street youth, upon haemophiliacs, the gay male community, women, injection drug users, and families with children. The book is divided into three sections: prevention, care, and practice. The first section on prevention looks at the role of community- and committee-based initiatives that many social workers were involved in, developing some of the most creative prevention programs in Canada. The second section on care covers a wide variety of topics and helps to illustrate the breadth of social work's involvement in HIV care and treatment. This includes chapters on women, children, the gay community, rural areas, Aboriginal street youth, and injection drug use. The third section of the text concerns itself with some of the practice issues that have surfaced in relation to the HIV epidemic in Canada which have forced us to reconsider a number of ethical and legal positions. This section also includes chapters on political activism and HIV/AIDS, confidentiality, haemophilia and blood transfusion, and euthanasia and assisted suicide. Social Work and HIV draws together some of the voices of experience that illustrate the kind of thinking in practice that social workers have gathered over the years. It is not meant to be an exhaustive work, but rather a representative one--one that can help new social workers coming into the field of HIV to more fully appreciate the challenges and opportunities the field holds.