AIDSWEEKLY Plus, Monday, 25 November 1996
Daniel J. DeNoon, Senior Editor

"The challenges are different now that the gay-white-male era is over," declared Jean Grier, Director of Client Services for AID Atlanta, Georgia. "Long gone are the days when you could assume your client came to the table well informed."

Grier spoke in a plenary address to the International Society for HIV/AIDS Education and Prevention's Tenth International Conference on AIDS Education, held November 9- 13, 1996, in Atlanta, Georgia.

AIDS is a disease of poverty, Grier said. "If we did not have poverty as a center of lack and need, we would not have any real problems with AIDS care."

Clients now require more help than ever before in negotiating the web of social services available to them.

"We're talking about people who must negotiate a complex system with no skills whatsoever," Grier said. "We are talking about people who never had a job interview, who never opened a bank account, who never ordered at a restaurant."

Partly to blame is a an insensitive, discourteous system. Grier cited the example of a clinic that scheduled all indigent patient appointments for 8 a.m. The patients, knowing that they would not be seen until 2 p.m., simply arrived shortly after 1 p.m. This resulted in their being labeled "non-compliant."

"It is not the patient but the system that is non- compliant," she said.

Grier predicted that funding for AIDS client care would continue to be insufficient, and called upon health-care workers to volunteer services.

"We need to look around and love those who are so much more worthy of love than we had ever thought," she said.

Grier paid tribute to the gay white males who, she said, were crucial to the establishment of AIDS services and who still represent a large proportion of clients.

"We must be careful not to abandon the gay white males on whose backs the system was built," she said.

961125
AW961108

Published by Charles Henderson, Publisher. Editorial & Publishing Office: P.O. Box 5528, Atlanta, GA 30307-0528 / Telephone: (800) 633-4931; Subscription Office: P.O. Box 830409, Birmingham, AL 35283-0409 / FAX: (205) 995-1588 http://www.newsrx.net

Copyright © 1996 - Charles Henderson, Publisher. All rights Reserved. Permission to reproduce granted to AEGIS by Charles W. Henderson. Authorization to reproduce for personal use granted granted by C. W. Henderson, Publisher, provided that the fee of US$4.50 per copy, per page is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 27 Congress Street, Salem, Massachusetts 01970, USA.