National AIDS Commission to Offer Health Workers Training

Ivan Cruickshank

Healthcare workers from different health regions today completed the first component of a three-part training to build their capacity to provide care to clients, particularly those who are suffering from H.I.V/AIDS. The National AIDS Commission and the Caribbean Vulnerable Communities organization teamed up to provide the training. National AIDS Commission’s Program Manager, Adrianne Alpuche and Executive Director, Caribbean Vulnerable Communities, Ivan Cruickshank, shared that the training also extends to human rights issues and that’s why the judiciary and law enforcers need to be a part of the training.

Ivan Cruickshank, Executive Director, Caribbean Vulnerable Communities

“We work with different duty bearers such as your healthcare workers, your police, your judicial officers, to ensure that if those rights are violated that they’re able to provide redress to them, and for those who are providing services, that they are able to provide service free of stigma and discrimination. One of the things that we also do – and we did during the period of COVID – but something that we are still looking to continue is to provide some sort of social grants to communities that are most vulnerable. So we do small grants to various organizations that are working with the various populations and what they would do is to identify what some of those need.”

Adrianne Alpuche

Adrianne Alpuche, Program Officer, National AIDS Commission

“We deal with vulnerable population when it comes to HIV and STDs, so having this training on human rights and discrimination and stigma, we notice that these are the persons that are vulnerable to the system. So we’re trying to navigate persons to be able to be comfortable going to the systems and persons providing the services to know how to deal with these vulnerable populations when encountering them. It’s a three, sorry, two-day session with three different components. It’s the police officers. We did that last week and it was about 25 new persons going into the police academy. Today we are doing the healthcare workers, so it’s from upper management to lower management, the deputies, directors, the pharmacists, everyone dealing with clients. In two weeks time, we’re gonna do justice bearers, who would be the magistrate judges and so forth. We haven’t confirmed those as yet while we’re working on it.”