The Quality of Life of HIV+ and HIV- people living in Elandsdoorn, South Africa. And the role of physical health, mental health and coping strategies.

Abstract

HIV/AIDS is a huge problem in South Africa; the country has the highest rate of HIV infected people in the world. With the introduction of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART), the life expectancy of people living with HIV/AIDS has been increased. As the survival of people living with HIV/AIDS has been increased and people living with HIV/AIDS do not die as a direct consequence of the disease, HIV/AIDS is now seen as a chronic disease. This change cases that the quality of life (QOL) of people living with HIV/AIDS has become an important focus for researchers and health care providers. Different concepts and findings explain the influence and impact of being HIV infected on the physical health and mental health, which influences the health related QOL. The current quantitative research explores the QOL of people living in Elandsdoorn, South Africa. The study takes into account the mental health, physical health and coping strategies (task-oriented coping, emotion-oriented coping and avoidance-oriented coping) and explores their relation with the QOL. Also explores the difference in QOL between HIV+ and HIV- people. Questionnaires were used to explore this at a group of 202 adults in the age group of 19 to 65 years (M=40), of which 198 participants (54 HIV+) joined the final sample. Based on the results, the conclusion can be made that, controlling for gender and age, both physical health and mental health are predictors of the QOL. The better the physical health and/or the mental health, the higher the QOL will be. Results show that coping strategies are mediating the influence of physical health and mental health on the QOL. When comparing the results of the HIV+ and HIV- population, it is seen that for the HIV- people, physical health, mental health and avoidance-oriented coping are influence the QOL. The more use of avoidance-oriented coping the higher the QOL will be. However, for the HIV+ people it is seen that the mental health of people with HIV+ does not influence the QOL. Also the QOL of the HIV+ population is mediated by almost all coping strategies. The more use of task-oriented coping strategy and the less use of emotion-oriented coping, the higher the QOL will be. Practically this means that new intervention programs should focus more on physical health and coping strategies to avoid a negative QOL outcome, and not so much on mental health. However, results of the study also show that not all theoretical distinctions described by previous research contribute to the explanation of whether the QOL of HIV- people does not differ much from the QOL of HIV+ people. Due to the limitations of the current study, future study can be focus on exploring additional aspects of the health related QOL that might be present in the current sample and theoretical distinctions that explain the relation between aspects of health and the difference in QOL between the HIV+ and HIV- population