Community Action Harm Reduction (CHAR) Project: End of project baseline assessment for Malaysia

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Community Action Harm Reduction (CHAR) Project: End of project baseline assessment for Malaysia

15 August 2014

Community Action on Harm Reduction (CAHR) is a project that aims at protecting and promoting the rights of injecting drug users, their partners and children with a wide range of services by fostering an enabling environment for HIV and harm reduction programming in five countries, including Malaysia. The project is supported by International HIV/AIDS Alliance and funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

This end of project assessment was conducted among People Who Inject Drugs (PWIDs) examining their drug injecting practices, risky injecting behaviour, relationship with police and law, sexual behaviour knowledge about HIV/AIDS and safe injecting, HIV testing, services received by PWID and satisfaction with the services, factors associated with usage of clean needles and syringes, and their well-being and quality of life.

Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 280 existing and new clients of the CAHR project using a structured close-ended questionnaire. Proportionate stratified sampling and simple random sampling with replacement were used to identify the number of clients for the study in four of the eight CAHR centres in Malaysia and to select the respondents for the interviews, respectively.

The goal of the year end project is to explore a set of key questions related to the effectiveness of CAHR project implementation in Malaysia. The questions that the baseline survey and end-of-project evaluation attempt to answer are the following:

  • The effectiveness (added-value) of additional wrap around services (additional community-oriented interventions other than the 9 interventions included ‘comprehensive package’ of HIV and harm reduction endorsed by the World Health Organization) for IDUs and their families;
  • To what extent are services provided demand driven? What are the key factors that make the service attractive / not attractive to the clients?
  • Knowledge / attitudes / behavior of IDUs in relation to HIV/AIDS before and after project implementation;
  • Well-being and quality of life of IDUs before and after project implementation; and
  • Relations with police; compulsory rehabilitation/detoxification centres

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