Quality of Life of Zambians Living with HIV & AIDS

Introduction: The HIV/AIDS disease has changed individual lifestyles and quality of life, as the HIV disease progresses, quality of life deteriorates. It is vital that the quality of life of PLWHA is assessed regularly so that they are given holistic care that is able to ameliorate the symptoms of ill health and improve their quality of life.Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the quality of life of Zambians living with HIV/AIDSMethod: The study used a cross-sectional descriptive design. This study was conducted in both rural and urban antiretroviral clinics in Zambia on 160 PLWHAof various HIV ranging from asymptomatic to full blown AIDS. Three scales, “Zambian WHOQOL-HIV Scale” (á = .896); “Zambian WHOHIV SRPB Scale” (á = .699); “Zambian WHOHIV medication dependence Scale” (á = .801); derived from the WHOQOL-HIV were used to assess quality of life.Results: A third of the participants reported very high medication dependence (32.5%). Two thirds of the participants (66%) had good or very good spirituality. Majority of the participants (82.2%) had good or very good quality of life. The results show that the quality of life, medication dependence and spirituality for the Zambian sample were all above average. Quality of life had significant positive relationships with all of its domains and a significant positive relationship with spirituality.Conclusion: Because little investigation has been done on quality of life in HIV/AIDS in developing countries such as Zambia, the current study is a vital step in addressing the issue of quality of life. The finding that quality of life of Zambian people living with HIV/AIDS is above average may mean that thepreventive and health care programs that are being used for education and provision of antiretroviral medication are yielding good results, this progress should be harnessed.Keywords: Quality of Life, HIV & AIDS, Zambia