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For more than 30 years, HIV infection has been one of the most serious diseases with a tremendous emotional, psychological, medical, social, economic and financial impact. Continuous medical research has turned this malady from an acute medical condition into a chronic disease, which can be controlled today using specific antiviral therapy. Nevertheless, the HIV infection continues to be a serious public health condition because it affects people at any age: children, adults and the elderly. The following study presents the case of a young HIV positive woman who was diagnosed at a late stage while she was pregnant with her first child. In 2009, at the time of her first HIV positive result, the young woman was 20 years old; she was not married to her life partner and was living with him in his parents’ house. The HIV positive test and the diagnosis of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) forced this young woman, her partner and her partner’s family to face a very difficult situation which they struggled to accept for a long time. Their involvement with social assistance began in 2009 when this young woman came to the Clinical Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Cluj-Napoca for the first time. The intervention was constant for the first five years, during which time the young woman and her partner formed a family, became parents of an HIV positive girl and of a boy who is still being monitored until the age of eighteen months. The entire family will be monitored over an unspecified period of time. The main purpose of this intervention was to help the young woman to adapt to the diagnosis of HIV infection, several different methods of intervention were used depending on her situation over time: crisis intervention, client centered therapy, the resource based method
Keywords: HIV/AIDS, family case study, social work in hospital, Romania
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