HIV and Drug Use: Community Responses to Injecting Drug Use and HIV

This guide is one in a series of Good Practice Guides produced by the Alliance for the purpose of bringing together expertise from their global community-level HIV programming to define and guide good practice in a range of technical areas.

The HIV and drug use Good practice guide is aimed at people who are developing and delivering HIV and harm reduction programmes or services at a community level in resource-poor settings. It is also relevant for people working where there are low levels of capacity or political support for harm reduction programmes.

It aims to support the scale up of community-based HIV and harm reduction programmes in developing and transitional countries. It looks at practice and research and also sets out an approach to programming at the community level where communities are fighting poverty, rapid social change, inequality and sometimes restrictive political cultures.

The guide distills some of the important findings, concerns, issues and considerations found to be effective in many settings. It will also support HIV programmers to think through these considerations and apply them to their own setting.

The publication is organised into chapters covering the following topics:

• Drug use, HIV and health – what are the issues?  This chapter provides an overview of drug usage, effects, associated health issues, crime, and sexuality.
• Special populations – The needs of specific groups.  Special attention in this chapter is brought to women, children and young people, and people in prison or detention.
• What needs to change?  The information in this chapter focusses on intervention programmes, behavioural change and health promotion, and the development of "social capital" to promote healthy decision making and education.
• Approaches.  Several programme types are discussed in this chapter, including harm reduction programming, community mobilisation, and gender-sensitive programming.
• Harm reduction interventions.  This chapter offers additional information on harm reduction intervention types, as well as selecting and planning interventions.
• Involving people who use drugs and other stakeholders.  How to involve the right people in effective HIV programmes focussing on people who use drugs.
• Appendices.  Alliance good practice HIV programming standards - HIV and drug use

Each guide in the Alliance good practice series is accompanied by a set of programming standards.  According to the Alliance, implementing these is one of the ways that organisations can define and promote a unified and quality-driven approach to HIV programming.