Geraldine Fela, "Critical Care: Nurses on the Frontline of Australia's AIDS Crisis" (UNSW Press, 2024)

About this episode

Geraldine Fela discusses the critical role of nurses during Australia's AIDS crisis and the impact of grassroots movements on healthcare responses.

The claim that real change is enabled by grassroots, community-based movements might seem a distant ideal, but Dr Geraldine Fela shows such assertions are far from hypothetical. Critical Care: Nurses on the Frontline of Australia's AIDS Crisis (UNSW Press, 2024) shows that grassroots movements were what made Australia’s response to the AIDS epidemic better than elsewhere. HIV and AIDS devastated communities across Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. In the midst of this profound health crisis, nurses provided crucial care to those living with and dying from the virus. They negotiated homophobia and complex family dynamics as well as defending the rights of their patients. Bringing together stories from across the country, historian Geraldine Fela documents the extraordinary care, compassion and solidarity shown by HIV and AIDS nurses. Critical Care unearths the important and unexamined history of nurses and nursing unions as caregivers and political agents who helped shape Australia's response to HIV and AIDS. In addition to this NBN interview Geraldine Fela has a podcast episode on the ABC Rewind series, 'Blood Prejudice and Nursing' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Geraldine Fela

Topics covered

• AIDS crisis
• nursing
• grassroots movements
• healthcare history
• HIV
• community care

Keywords

• AIDS
• nurses
• HIV
• Australia
• healthcare
• grassroots movements
• history
• compassion
• solidarity

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: UNSW Press

Places: Australia

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