Assessment of Knowledge, Attitude, Practice and Willingness of People Living with HIV/AIDS to Share Personal Health Information to their Community in North West Ethiopia

Abstract

Introduction: Getting full personal health information especially from people living with HIV/AIDS has a great challenging due to fear of stigma and discrimination in developing countries like Ethiopia. Lack of knowledge, attitude, practice and willingness of people living with HIV/AIDS to share their health information may affect the quality of their life. This study aimed to assess the knowledge, attitude, practice and willingness of people living with HIV/AIDS to share their personal health information to their community. Materials and Methods: A hospital based cross -sectional study was conducted from December, 2013 to May, 2014. All information’s were collected through interview using structured questionnaires. The data was entered, processed and analyzed using SPSS version 20 statistical software. The 95% confident interval and the p-value were used to check for association between the dependent and independent variables. A p-value of <0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: Out of the total 422 participants included in the study, only 43 (10.2%) of respondents were knowledgeable and 379 (89.8%) were none knowledgeable. Moreover, 12 (2.8%), 408 (96.7%) and 125 (29.6%) of the participants were with a favorable attitude, good practice and favorable willing to share personal health information, respectively. Conclusion: Majority of study participants have inadequate knowledge, none favorable attitude and willingness but significant proportions of them have good practice on sharing of their personal health information to others. So that new strategies should be established in health facilities to develop knowledge, attitude, practice and willingness of people living with HIV/AIDS to share their personal health information to their community, this will bring a radical change in prevention and control of HIV/AIDS transmission.