Challenges to implementing OST in Ukrainian prisons: Personnel attitudes toward addiction, treatment, and people with HIV/AIDS

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Challenges to implementing OST in Ukrainian prisons: Personnel attitudes toward addiction, treatment, and people with HIV/AIDS

6 January 2015

Ukraine is experiencing one of the most volatile HIV epidemics globally, fueled primarily by people who inject drugs (PWIDs), and a parallel incarceration epidemic. Opioid substitution therapy (OST) is internationally recognized as one of the most effective forms of treatment for opioid dependence and is among the most effective HIV prevention strategies available, yet efforts to adopt it in Ukraine's Criminal Justice System (CJS) have been thwarted.

In Ukraine, the adoption of OST is more influenced by ideological biases and prejudices than by existing scientific evidence. By elucidating existing attitudes among CJS personnel, this assessment will help direct subsequent interventions to address the barriers to implementing evidence-based HIV prevention treatments.

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