EVERY PERSON LIVING WITH HIV HAS A UNIQUE STORY—AND SO DO YOU
Understanding how to navigate your HIV journey can be challenging, but you don’t have to do it alone. Members of the HIV community are an invaluable source of support, and their unique stories can help guide and shape your journey. You can hear from people living with HIV and learn how their experiences—from building relationships with healthcare providers to embracing positive living—have shaped the stories they share below.
Open and active dialogue
As a person living with HIV, you too have a complex life that changes every day. When discussing HIV care with your healthcare provider, ensure that you openly communicate about all aspects of your health, including your quality of life or wellbeing. Though it may be uncomfortable at first, open communication with your healthcare provider can help build a strong, trusting relationship and may help support better health-related quality of life outcomes.[1]
“The things that make a big difference for me [when working with my health care provider] is an open attitude.”
Measuring your wellbeing
During your HIV journey, you may not realise that other aspects of your day-to-day life are impacting your overall wellbeing. Remember, your overall wellbeing is an important part of your HIV care. To assess wellbeing (also known as quality of life) for people living with HIV, the PozQoL Scale was designed as a short, easy-to-use tool. It assesses four key domains of wellbeing:[2,3]
- Psychological
- Social
- Physical
- Functional
The PozQoL Digital Tool provides a convenient way to measure and track your wellbeing online. It can be completed before or during a consultation and saved or e-mailed, to help start the conversation about your wellbeing with your healthcare provider or peer navigator.
Visit the PozQoL Digital Tool
“When I actually sat down to do the PozQoL tool, I realised…there are areas in my life where HIV is affecting me.”
Positive living. Your way.
HIV care is not just about viral suppression, it is also about overall wellbeing. For some, this might mean living life to the fullest, embracing authenticity, or connecting with community—it could be entirely different for you. Whatever you decide, remember that living well is unique to each person living with HIV.
“I look a lot to other people in my community to understand how are they dealing with their wellbeing so that I can learn from that as well.”
“I'm going to actually start living life. I'm not here to sit in a waiting room, I'm here to take control of my life.”
“Believing or expecting well into the future means everything to me.”
References:
- Positive perspective study, wave 2 results report: A view into the lives of people living with HIV. ViiV Healthcare. Available at: https://viivhealthcare.com/content/dam/cf-viiv/viivhealthcare/en_GB/files/211203-updated-pp2-report-v9.0.pdf [Accessed January 2025].
- Brown G et al. BMC Public Health. 2018; 18(1): 527.
- PozQoL. About PozQoL. Available at https://www.pozqol.org/about-pozqol/ [Accessed January 2025]
NP-AU-HVU-WCNT-250001 | Date of preparation: February 2025.
