Perceived stigma and discrimination is the cause for employees not to participate on the HIV/AIDS work programme.

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Background: What accounts for failure of employee to register on the workplaceHIV/AIDS programme after testing positive? This could be associated with many thingssuch as stigma and discrimination, fear of losing job because of HIV status, or even lackof knowledge about HIV/AIDS and about the workplace HIV/AIDS programme. A studywithin Edcon employees was designed to examine the cause of failure to register onworkplace HIV/AIDS programme. Qualitative data were collected from four provinces,which are Gauteng, Empumalanga, North West and Limpopo. A 59 questions survey wasgiven to 550 participants at different site during the morning briefing session. Participantswere selected randomly irrespective of gender, age, cultural diversity, race, academiclevel, colour, creed or HIV status. Participants were briefed for five minutes and asked toanswer questions based on the knowledge they had on HIV/AIDS. All questions wereclosed ended and was easy to answer and required fewer instructions and could beanswered even by participants with lower educational level. Questionnaires werecollected immediately after being filled and four hundred and twenty were correctlycompleted with no faults one hundred and thirty (130) were void because of errors. Thelevels of knowledge and attitudes held by the participants with regard to HIV/AIDS washigh 69% but low with knowledge of workplace HIV/AIDS programme, which was13.2%. According to results there was less or no discrimination in the workplace andeven in the community in all participants this amounted to 10, 5%. Stigma is a seriousproblem which need to be addressed, fear of contracting HIV/AIDS, negative judgementsabout people living with HIV/AIDS and compounded stigma, is very high at 78%. Stigmacreates barriers to HIV/AIDS, prevention and disease management, it makes people to beafraid of rejection and chose to keep their status to them self and not to seek help. Thehypothesis of the study was not supported, even though there were respondents who saidthey could not stomach working, or living with HIV positive people, but it was difficultto measure the level of stigma and discrimination, the results were be weighed on thenumber of responses that indicated that there individual who have had secondaryexperience or directly involve with the acts of discrimination regard to stigma anddiscrimination. The level of stigma and discrimination could not be measured accurately.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University