title: Concealment tactics among HIV-positive nurses in Uganda.
abstract: This paper is based on two-and-a-half years of ethnographic fieldwork in two rural Ugandan health centres during a period of ART scale-up. Around one-third of the nurses in these two sites were themselves HIV-positive but most concealed their status. We describe how a group of HIV-positive nurses set up a secret circle to talk about their predicament as HIV-positive healthcare professionals and how they developed innovative care technologies to overcome the skin rashes caused by ART that threatened to give them away. Together with patients and a traditional healer, the nurses resisted hegemonic biomedical norms denouncing herbal medicines and then devised and advocated for a herbal skin cream treatment to be included in the ART programme.
authors.affiliation: College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. margaretkyakuwa@yahoo.com
authors.forename: Margaret
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kyakuwa
authors.forename: Anita
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hardon
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000739:Anecdotes as Topic; D003152:Community Health Nursing; D008192:Deception; D005260:Female; D006679:HIV Seropositivity / Q000523:psychology*; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D009726:Nurses / Q000523:psychology*; D011363:Professional Impairment / Q000523:psychology*; D012423:Rural Health; D019035:Rural Health Services; D012649:Self Concept; D014342:Truth Disclosure; D014454:Uganda; D055815:Young Adult