Hepatitis Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Hepatitis, including details on hepatitis a, b, c, causes, symptoms.

Prejudice among health care workers toward injecting drug users with hepatitis C: does greater contact lead to less prejudice?

Brener L, von Hippel W, Kippax S

School of Psychology and National Centre in HIV Social Research, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia. l.brener@unsw.edu.au <l.brener@unsw.edu.au>

The current research measured explicit (self-reported) and implicit (or unconscious) attitudes of health care workers and their drug injecting clients with hepatitis C virus (HCV) toward each other, and the association of these attitudes with contact. Sixty health care workers and 120 of their clients with HCV acquired from injecting drug use were administered attitude measures to determine whether greater contact with HCV positive clients would result in more favourable attitudes on the part of health care workers toward these clients, and also on the part of these clients towards their health care workers. Findings suggest that increased contact with clients with HCV is associated with more favourable explicit attitudes and more negative implicit attitudes among health care workers toward injecting drug users. Health care workers who had greater contact with HCV positive clients also had HCV positive clients who held more favourable explicit attitudes toward health care workers, but contact was uncorrelated with implicit attitudes of clients toward health care workers.

Published 14 September 2007 in Int J Drug Policy, 18(5): 381-7.
Full-text of this article is available online (may require subscription).

© 2006-2008 Hepatitis Research Today. All Rights Reserved.