To alleviate the impacts of COVID-19 policies, many initiatives have been developed by civil society organisations – NGOs, local governments, or citizens. A team of national researchers from the RESISTIRÉ project has collected and highlighted a set of particularly relevant initiatives in 27 European countries and in Iceland, Serbia, the United Kingdom and Turkey. These Better Stories cover eight specific domains: gender-based violence, the labour market, the economy, gender-pay and pension gaps, gender care gaps, decision-making and politics, environmental justice, human and fundamental rights.
This Better Story was collected by Monica Stroe
Filling the gap left by shortcomings in the public healthcare system
Sens Pozitiv Association is an NGO working to improve the quality of life of HIV patients and of persons from vulnerable categories who are at risk of contracting HIV. A significant part of the organisation’s work consists in supporting HIV-positive persons in accessing the specific HIV medication, thus substituting the public healthcare system’s failure to provide medication and medical services for HIV patients.
Empowering HIV-Positive Individuals and Healthcare Communities
InformatHIV is an initiative of the association intended to provide trustworthy information to HIV-positive patients, as well as to healthcare professionals, activists and the general public. During the COVID19 pandemic, the project expanded to address the new provocations of living with HIV in Romania, by providing information on matters such as vaccination and the HIV-positive status, accessing health services during restrictions and the specific vulnerabilities to COVID-19 of patients living with HIV and HIV-vulnerable persons. The project also initiated raising awareness (e.g. delayed testing, patients’ access to their treating physicians, cuts of public funding for HIV programs etc).
Photo by Hannah Busing from Unsplash