Category: Articles | Page 19

What it will take to eliminate hepatitis C in Canada

July 5, 2018 • By Rivka Kushner

Canada is one of 194 countries that endorsed the World Health Organization’s Global Health Sector Strategy on Viral Hepatitis in 2016, committing to – among other things – the elimination of viral hepatitis as a major public health threat by 2030. But what does eliminating viral hepatitis mean in practice? The recent Global Hepatitis Summit in Toronto from June 14 to 17, 2018, brought together researchers, healthcare providers, and public health practitioners from around the world to try to answer this question. Presenters shared the latest research findings, marked which countries are on track to meet the targets, and discussed...

Le site d’injection supervisée de l’organisme montréalais Dopamine : bientôt un an déjà

June 11, 2018 • By Yanick Paradis

Depuis plus de 10 ans que nous attendions ce moment : les sites d’injection supervisée (SIS) sont arrivés! Nous y voilà rendus! Ça fait bientôt un an que nous sommes ouverts. Mise en contexte : les SIS sont un projet régional qui est chapeauté par plusieurs structures. Quatre organismes communautaires, dont Dopamine, et le Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux du Centre-Sud-de-l’Île-de-Montréal sont dans le coup et assurent les ressources humaines nécessaires pour mettre en place un tel service. Ceci dit, Dopamine est un organisme en réduction des méfaits qui travaille en prévention VIH, VHC et autres ITSS dans...

The critical state of trans health care and the importance of therapeutic alliance

May 28, 2018 • By Florence Ashley

I don’t really like medical spaces. For me, they’re not just spaces that are essential to my health, but also spaces of exclusion and trauma. How often have I heard about people from my communities being refused care? A chronic migraine blamed on hormones. An open wound left unbandaged because they “don’t have the expertise necessary to deal with that kind of people”. And what about inappropriate questions, wrong names on files, or deadnames read out loud in the waiting room, in front of everyone?

HIV and life insurance: A welcome change but questions remain

May 8, 2018 • By Wendy Porch and Jeff Potts

Historically, people living with HIV in Canada have been excluded from access to life insurance. In recent years, however, both Manulife and Sun Life have started accepting applications from people living with HIV, now that HIV is widely recognized as a manageable chronic illness. Nevertheless, this significant change in policy is not well-known within the HIV sector. How can we change that and how can we facilitate access to life insurance for people living with HIV? With these two questions in mind, we at Realize and the Canadian Positive People Network (CPPN) surveyed our members and the insurance sector to...

PositiveLite.com: It’s gone, so what next?

April 9, 2018 • By Bob Leahy

It’s not surprising that PositiveLite.com —what we called Canada’s online HIV magazine but it was, I’d argue, so much more —came to an end on March 31. It had been going for nine years. It was a unique model run by people living with HV for people living with HIV. Most people thought we had big offices; in fact, we operated out of our own homes. We were independent in all senses of the word.

Learning from Saskatchewan’s HIV emergency

March 19, 2018 • By Susanne Nicolay

Saskatchewan has led the country in the rate of new HIV infections and the proportion of people living with HIV since 2009. The HIV epidemic in this province is unique from other jurisdictions in Canada in that more than three-quarters of our new infections occur in people who use injection drugs (the Canadian average is less than 14%).