Personal and Family Action Plans

Purpose and Rationale

This exercise involves the development of personal plans to allow participants to protect themselves from (re)infection and in so doing to increase understanding of the effectiveness of various strategies and factors which may facilitate or impede the implementation of these plans.

Procedure

Ask participants to spend 10 minutes drawing up personal action plans. Explain that these will not be presented back to the group. They are requested to respect the confidentiality of any personal information that may be disclosed during the session.

Each plan should state the objectives and strategies the person has adopted or intends to adopt, including action to anticipate and overcome constraints.

When these are completed, lead a discussion on different protective strategies and their relative effectiveness, impediments and facilitating factors. Following this, ask participants to re-read their plans and invite them to amend them as necessary in light of the discussion.

Ask participants to spend a further fifteen minutes preparing an action plan for their family (however this is defined), a group of close friends or for colleagues. Two or three volunteers should be asked to share their plans with the group.

Focus the ensuing discussion on the issue of how people can be influenced, encouraged, supported or pressured to change behaviour .

Materials:
Time: 60 minutes

Personal Action Plans

The facilitator should discuss with the group the strengths and weaknesses inherent in various strategies. Points for discussion include:

· no plan will work unless those implicated agree;

· plans require a degree of self knowledge and intimacy (freedom of communication) between sexual partners. The less intimacy, the less the trust, the more restrictive the personal action plan might have to be;

· celibacy may leave the person unprepared for the unexpected. Unsafe sex often results from not being prepared with a condom or being unpractised in negotiation;

· internal genital surfaces of young women mature slowly during their teens and are more easily damaged than those of women in their twenties, thirties and forties. This is another strong reason for delaying sexual debut;

· internal genital surfaces of women who have passed the menopause are more easily damaged than those of women in their childbearing years. Personal action plans should take this into account and should include the use of water-based lubricants if necessary;

· an undamaged genital area reduces the risk of HIV transmission. This is an essential part of any personal action plan. Keeping the genital area healthy is crucial for those who cannot use condoms or avoid unprotected penetrative sexual intercourse, or those unable to negotiate safer sex, and those who want to have children;

· effective male condom use requires consistent use of good quality condoms and that these be available, affordable and accessible. For women, condom use by men as a strategy is more complex since it requires the continued and consistent co-operation of a partner. The same is true for receptive partners of anal intercourse.

· female condoms allow women to have some degree of control. These are not yet widely available, affordable or accessible. Their use may still require negotiation.

· fidelity is an effective option when both partners are uninfected at the onset of the relationship and remain unfailingly faithful. Even in the context of mutually trusting relationship, couples may reach agreement on condom use with any other partner should this eventually occur.
· non-penetrative sex may be a possibility but needs to be perceived as a valid sexual option in its own right and not simply as a "preliminary" to intercourse;

· knowing one's own weaknesses and avoiding potential risk situations is a good feature of a personal action. It requires honesty and self knowledge;

· personal action plans should acknowledge the disinhibiting effects of alcohol, recreational drugs and loneliness;

· Strategies to avoid coerced sex should be part of every woman's and some men's personal action plans.

Family Action Plans

Family action plans should cover not only immediate prevention but also strategies to address issues relating to:

· changing the way children are raised and socialised as boys and girls;
· personality formation: self-esteem, self-confidence, autonomy, respect for others;
· moral and religious values formation;
· cultural factors;
· taboos, talking about sex, death, relationships.

Whilst the plan is for the family, the community and other external influences on family must be taken into account.

Workplace Action Plans

Workplace action plans are similar to family action plans in that they reveal the limit of the individual's ability to influence behaviour of others and the need to work collaboratively with others. Workplace action plans should include strategies for changing attitudes and values in the workplace as well as the behaviour of colleagues.

Follow-up Action Plan

Purpose and Rationale

Share the following with participants.

You have participated in the HIV and Development workshop which was designed to:

C broaden the scope of current knowledge of the social and economic dimension of the HIV epidemic and its implications for sustainable human development;
C strengthen capacity to analyse the social and economic consequences of the impact of the epidemic at individual, community, and national levels;
C enhance skills for the planning and implementation of integrated multisectoral programmes and projects.

With this knowledge, you are a potentially important part of your country's human resource base. However, in order to play this role effectively, it will be necessary to translate knowledge, insights and skills acquired during the workshop into concrete activities at individual, family and workplace levels.

It is important to cooperate with existing national response mechanisms to the epidemic and to develop a follow-up plan which will lead to concrete activities towards strengthening your national programme.

Procedure

Ask participants to draft a follow-up plan for the workshop. Three main areas of activity are recommended:

1. Feedback to management on skills and knowledge gained from the workshop in order to secure support in establishing effective policies and programmes.

2.
3. Developing effective policies and programmes on prevention, care and support within your institution/agency.
4. Integration of an HIV-related component into the regular activities of your institution/agency, so as to address the multiple ways in which the organisation is affected.

Each of these areas should be presented as a table indicating activities, required and available resources, schedule, sources of support (material, financial and technical) as attached.

1.

2.

Model for the development of an action plan

Workshop Assessment

1. Please describe in what ways the workshop did or did not meet your expectations.

2. In your opinion, the following topics or procedures were not covered and should be covered in future workshops.

3. In your opinon, the following topics or procedures should be covered in a better and different manner in future workshops.

4. Please share with us your comments on the workshop process.

5. Please share with us your comments on the performance of the facilitation team. What suggestions do you have to improve this performance?

6. What are your comments on the general content of the workshop?

7. How useful did you find the approach and the process used to deliver this approach?

8. Other comments on the workshop: organization, materials, logistics, ambiance...

HIV and Development Programme Publications

Available online athttp://www.undp.org/hiv

Gender and the HIV Epidemic

· Adolescent Sexuality, Gender and the HIV Epidemic, 1998
· Dying of Sadness: Gender, Sexual Violence and the HIV Epidemic, 1998
· Men and the HIV Epidemic, 1998