AIDS prevention through health promotion: Facing sensitive issues: PART 3 Increasing the credibility of the message: peers and patients as health promoters

AIDS prevention through health promotion: Facing sensitive issues

Acknowledgements

Preface

PART 1 Starting with ourselves

Emotional responses to the AIDS pandemic

Overcoming barriers in ourselves

PART 2 Approaching your audience: emotive appeal, tone, and setting of messages

The role of qualitative research in AIDS prevention

Media health campaigns: not just what you say, but the way you say it

The Grim Reaper: Australia's first mass media AIDS education campaign

One of our sons is missing: using theatre to confront sensitive issues

PART 3 Increasing the credibility of the message: peers and patients as health promoters

The Swiss Hot Rubber Campaign: self-proclaimed gays take responsibility for informing their community

Prostitutes teaching prostitutes in Nairobi

The role of people with HIV infection, their families and friends as health educators

PART 4 Gaining the support of those with influence

Introducing AIDS education in schools

Influencing decision-makers through video: experience in Ghana

PART 3 Increasing the credibility of the message: peers and patients as health promoters

Part 2 illustrated the difficulty of making allowance for emotional reactions to AIDS in developing health promotional materials. This section examines one approach to solving many of the problems-the use of peers and patients for health promotion against AIDS.

Roger Staub describes a campaign to reduce high-risk behaviour among homosexuals in Switzerland, in which the chief protagonists were self-proclaimed homosexuals. The campaign led to the development of promotional material-booklets, posters-and a type of condom that met the needs of the target group.

Elizabeth Ngugi and Francis Plummer describe a project in Nairobi, Kenya, that brought together prostitutes to learn the facts about AIDS. The most knowledgeable were then recruited to educate others. One aim of the project was to encourage a large number of prostitutes to insist on condoms, so that clients could not refuse to use them.

John David Dupree and Stephen Beck describe how promotional projects are now using people who are HIV-infected, including those with AIDS, as educators. The physical presence of such people and their comments make educational sessions both more human and more effective. While most of the work is currently being done in the United States of America, the technique is also being tried in Sierra Leone, Uganda, and the Caribbean area.

These papers support the argument that in health promotion programmes on very personal issues, such as sexual behaviour, the person designing and delivering the messages and materials must understand the attitudes of the group being addressed. In terms of understanding and sensitivity, people who belong to the group itself may often be the best health promoters.