Posted by Harry I am a MD working the field of paediatric HIV in South Africa. We are experiencing some difficulty in getting parents/care-givers to bring children for HIV tests - possibly related to stigma, value of children in the community and the financial costs involved in transport/time away from work involved in brining children to health care facilities. I am interested in exploring the use photographs as an interventional community psychotherapy tool to get parents to test their children for HIV. The very rough concept is to display photographs (not sure of what yet as are doing some qualitative work to determine barriers)in public spaces (eg taxi ranks, shops, scools etc) with the intention (ouch!)of getting community members to reflect on the value of children and HIV and health and hopefully to get parents/caregivers to respond by bringing children for testing. A number of projects have previously used photographs to raise awareness, however I have been unable to find much discourse around the impact of such projects on either an individual or community level. I have a very limited understanding of the conceptual difficulties involved in trying to perform mass phototherapy in public spaces rather than on an individual basis with therapists in attendance but think it may be worth a try. While it is probably a madly over ambitious idea, I would be very grateful for any comments, ideas, suggestions or readings (I have looked through the reading lists online but haven't seen much that seemed to talk to this concept). And lastly, thankyou for the wealth of knowledge provided on this website and for reqading this post. Harry
on 7/30/2006, 6:38 am
198.54.202.210
Hi
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