Promoção da qualidade de vida e o tempo de diagnóstico entre pessoas vivendo com HIV

Abstract

This study aims to understand the relationship established between representations and practices to promote quality of life and the time since diagnosis for people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This is a descriptive exploratory study with a qualitative approach, based on the Social Representation Theory and based on a structural and procedural approach. A total of 258 subjects living with HIV and followed up in Specialized Care Services located in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Macaé participated in this study. A questionnaire was applied to sociodemographic characterization of participants and the collect of free evocations to the term “quality of live” and a semi-structured interview was conducted. Data were analyzed by the softwares SPSS and Ensemble de Programmes Permettant l'Analyse des Evocations (EVOC), with the construction of a table of four houses and the interviews underwent of thematic content analysis.In the analysis of the general group, the elements “adequate nutrition”, “health”, “work”, “good health” and “health care” were defined in the possible central core of the representation. The terms reveal a biomedical dimension that encompasses practices linked to health promotion, in addition to social aspects and the evaluative dimension of quality of life, questions that find correspondence in the categories constructed from content analysis, namely: physical health and quality of life; social aspects of quality of life; positive view of life and religious practice; negative feelings and experience of prejudice; use of drug therapy; condom use and sexual experience; relevance of work to quality of life and experiences related to the health service. The comparison of the representation of quality of life between subjects under 60 and over 96 months since diagnosis points to the existence, in the first group, of a greater appreciation of the family structure and the aspects the health promoting, while the second, it demonstrates the appreciation of issues linked to work and self-responsibility for their health situation, pointing to a more practical aspect of quality of life. It is concluded that the representation of quality of life is generally presented as positive and is permeated by functional and affective elements, focused on valuing the social, biomedical dimension and lifestyle habits and marked by a real or imaginary experience of the prejudice. The sharing of elements in the representations of the two subgroups suggests the existence of the same representation which presents different configurations based on the time of living with HIV.