3.5 Openness To Education

3.5 Openness to Education
Steroid users are a sub-culture group that is experiencing harms and yet 86% of participants identified a lack of opportunity for injecting advice from a professional as a nurse, doctor or NSP staff.
Overcoming barriers and challenges are paramount to providing safer harm reduction interventions. Due to the illicit nature and caution practiced establishing trust within the steroid using community is a must. Engaging people on a personal level to feel comfortable to ask questions and tailored training should be sought at front-line level for NSP staff. Further to this, perceptions of being a health supplement and not IV drug use impacts perceptions and barriers of a need to engage staff for information.
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There were no references to medical sites, with most common resources noted as online body building websites, forums and video bloggers on You Tube.
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In addition, this is vulnerable group who are not well educated in the best practices for harm reduction and appear to rely heavily on online forums and peer distributed information that is heavily providing defective and harmful information and poor practices that can lead to increase health risks for PIEDs communities.
5. Conclusions:
This report anticipated findings of majority of users surveyed would hold a greater knowledge of safer practices within this growing subculture. These findings suggest the PIEDs communities are under equipped with an awareness of harms and issues associated with their current practice and while admirable they actively seek information to protect their health. However are misguided in their approach to where they seek this information which is often unreliable and inaccurate which places this community under threat of unintentionally engaging in risky behaviours.
While most PIED users attempt to take an informed approach to their injecting health regime, this community present unique challenges and key issues around their community.
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